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COnfRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Literary Landmarks 

of the 

Scottish Universities 



By 
Laurence Hutton 



Illustrated 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York and London 

XLbc Ikuicheibocheu press 

1904 






J^"^ 



-a 



OCi 17 1904 

CLASS <:^ )fXo'No' 



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PY B 



Copyright, 1904 

BY 

ELEANOR V. HUTTON 



Published, October, 1904 



trbe Uniclierboclier Dreae, flew Iffork 



TO 

WOODROW WILSON 

A STERLING SON OF PRINCETON 

AND 

A DIRECT DESCENDANT OF THE SCHOOLS 
OF SCOTLAND 



Introductory Note 

IT seems now most fitting that the last 
book of literary landmarks written by 
Mr. Hutton should have been devoted to 
Scotland, the home of his ancestors, and 
the last chapter to St. Andrews University, 
in whose environing town his own father was 
born. The manuscript of this volume was 
sent to the printer some weeks before Mr. 
Hutton's death, but the proofs were returned 
too late for his revision. They have been 
read by a friend and neighbour of his in the 
town in which he died, a town which is the 
seat of an American university that has 
many historic associations with the univer- 
sities of which Mr. Hutton wrote. In per- 
forming this last office of the author in the 
printing of a book, his friend takes respon- 
sibility for any errors that may have crept 



vi Introductory Note 

into the text. The manuscript was prepared 
with conscientious care, and it is doubtful if 
Mr. Hutton would have changed a single 
line, for he set down naught except in kind- 
liest spirit, in gentlest humour, and in 
honesty. 

J. H. F. 

September i, 1904. 



Contents 



PAGE 

Edinburgh .....•! 

Glasgow 75 

Aberdeen ii5 

St. Andrews i49 

Index -195 



Illustrations 



Hawthornden . . Frontispiece 

Old College, Edinburgh 

Old College, Quadrangle, Edinburgh 

Thomas Carlyle .... 

New University Buildings, Edinburgh 

William Drummond 

Quadrangle, New University, Edin 

burgh ..... 
James Boswell .... 
Library Hall, Edinburgh . 
Henry Brougham .... 

John Brown 

McEwan Hall and Students' Union 

Edinburgh .... 
Charles Darwin .... 
Main Front, Old College, Glasgow 
John Gibson Lockhart 
Interior Court, Old College, Glas 

GOW 

ix 



24 
28^ 

36 

38 

48- 

52 
60 
62 
68 

72 
76 
84 



90 



X Illustrations 

PAGE 

Old College Gateway, Glasgow . 96 

James Watt 100 

Old College Gateway, in Present 

University, Glasgow . . . 102 

Francis Jeffrey 104 

Present University, Glasgow . . 108 

Walter Scott no 

King's College, Aberdeen . . .118 

Chapel, King's College, Aberdeen . 122 
Choir Stalls, King's College, Aber- 
deen . . . . . .126 

Library, King's College, Aberdeen . 130 
Library, King's College, Abereeen . 134 
Marischal College, Aberdeen . .138 
Quadrangle, Marischal College, Ab- 
erdeen 142 

Gate of Old Marischal College, Aber- 
deen ...... 144 

University, Aberdeen .... 146 

St. Leonard's College, St. Andrews, 

ABOUT 1750 152 

St. Salvator's College, St. Andrews, 

ABOUT 1750 156 

St. Mary's College, St. Andrews, 

ABOUT 1750 ..... 160 



Illustrations xi 



PAGE 



St. Leonard's Church, St. Andrews . 164 
College Church, St. Andrews . . 168 
Madras College and Black Friars' 

Monastery, St. Andrews . . 172 
The Pends, St. Andrews . . .176 
United Colleges, St. Andrews . . 180 
St. Mary's College, St. Andrews . 184 
New University Library, St. Andrews 188 
Thomas Chalmers . . . . .190 



Edinburgh 



Edinburgh 

EDINBURGH is the youngest, but not 
the least important, or the least in- 
teresting, of the Scottish universities; and, 
certainly, no other institution in the whole 
of Great Britain is more rich in its literary 
associations. 

One hundred and seventy years after the 
foundation of a university in the city of St. 
Andrews, and almost a century after King's 
College was established in Aberdeen, James 
Sixth of Scotland, in 1582, granted a charter 
under the Great Seal, authorising the found- 
ing of a university in Edinburgh. He was 
inspired thereto by the zeal of the Magis- 
trates and Town Council, who, "with other 
respectable citizens," were jealous of the 
growing intellectual supremacy of sister 
towns in the Kingdom; were anxious to 



4 Scottish Universities 

promote the cause of learning in general; 
and, especially, to encourage the liberal edu- 
cation of the youth of the Capital and its 
neighbourhood. 

The idea of the College was originally 
broached in 1560. In 1563, certain parts of 
the structures and grounds belonging to the 
Provost and prebendaries of the Collegiate 
Kirk o' Fields were purchased as a site. 
In 1 58 1, despite the antagonism of the Arch- 
bishop of St. Andrews, and of the Bishop of 
Aberdeen, the work of building was begun ; 
and in March, 1583, the first classes were 
held in the lower halls of Hamilton House, 
under two teachers only; one in "Bejan," 
one in Latin. The first class to be gradu- 
ated, that of 1587, was forty-seven strong. 
The Class of 1588 numbered thirty; and in 
the years immediately following, the general 
attendance was even smaller. 

A "Bejan," by the way, was a Freshman. 
The term came from the University of 
Paris; "Bec-jaune," in falconry, meaning 
a "callow hawk just out of the nest," fresh 



Edinburgh 5 

from home, and from home influences; a 
first-year's man. The second-year's men 
were called * * Semi-bejans, " or " Semies' ' ; in 
the third year they were known as "Bache- 
lors," and in the final session as **Magis- 
trands." 

The Collegiate Kirk o' Fields, whose site 
became the original home of the College, 
was the scene of the death of the unfortun- 
ate Darnley in 1567, the mystery of which 
has never yet been solved. Darnley was 
not a very admirable young gentleman, not- 
withstanding the fact that he was the hus- 
band of a queen, the father of a king, and 
the grandfather, so to speak, of a dynasty. 
The house in which, and with which, he was 
blown to pieces was afterwards repaired, and 
it was used, for a time, as a dwelling of the 
Principal of the University. It existed 
when Dalzel wrote, in 1803; and its site is 
now covered, in part, by the Library. 

The present "Old College Building * is 
upon the same spot ; except that the early 
structure faced the College Wynd, in which, 



6 Scottish Universities 

at the end of the eighteenth century, were 
the residences of the professors. 

The original plan of learning for this new 
seminary in Edinburgh was borrowed from 
that which prevailed in the earlier Scottish 
colleges, although it was divested, as far as 
was possible, of those antiquated forms and 
monastic ceremonies which were practised 
at the time of the rule of the Roman Catho- 
lic Church in Scotland, and by which the 
other institutions of the Kingdom had been 
very much embarrassed at the period of the 
Reformation. 

The session, in the beginning, lasted 
eleven months of the year; and the classes 
met daily at six A.M., in the winter; and at 
five A.M., in the summer. Until the open- 
ing of the eighteenth century, the first year 
was devoted to Latin, Greek, and dialectics ; 
the second year to a repetition of these, and 
also to arithmetic and rhetoric; the third 
year to rhetoric, Hebrew, and dialectical 
analysis; the fourth year to astronomy, 
geography, disputation, et ccstera. 



Edinburgh 7 

The University now has two annual ses- 
sions : the first lasting from the middle of 
October until the end of March ; the second, 
or summer, session from the beginning of 
May until the end of July. 

At the opening of the twentieth century 
there were forty or fifty professors in the 
various Faculties, of Arts, Divinity, Law, 
Medicine, Music, and Science, each Faculty 
having a Dean of its own. And there were 
nearly three thousand students, over two 
hundred of them being women. A com- 
paratively small percentage of these students 
obtain a degree, or attempt to be graduated. 
That is not what they go to the University 
for. They seek a certain amount of solid, 
valuable information on certain subjects, 
and in certain lines; and when they obtain 
this, they drop themselves quietly out. 
They do not wait, or permit themselves, to 
be dropped. 

The Medical Schools of Edinburgh were 
born towards the close of the seventeenth 
century in a small "Physic," or Botanical, 



8 Scottish Universities 

Garden, near Holyrood Palace. Botany- 
was recognised as a university subject, and 
the Curator of those "Physic Gardens" was 
made its first professor. Chairs of Chemis- 
try and Astronomy were shortly afterwards 
founded ; and the Medical Schools grew and 
flourished to their present greatness. 

When the space in the "Old College" be- 
came too limited to accommodate the yearly 
increasing number of students, the "New 
College Buildings," not far away, sprang 
into existence; and these are now the 
home of the famous Medical School; the 
College of Surgeons and the Royal Infirm- 
ary not being connected with the University 
proper. 

M'Ewan Hall, so named from a generous 
benefactor, is near to the "New University 
Buildings." It was opened in the winter 
of 1897-98; and since that time it has been 
used for the graduation ceremonies and for 
other public University functions. It is 
chief among the modern sights of the town ; 
and the local guide-books declare it to be 



Edinburgh 9 

"one of the grandest buildings erected in 
Europe during the nineteenth century." 

The earliest records of what, in America, 
is called "chapel," and no doubt it was 
compulsory, show that the gallery at the 
east end of the High Church, St. Giles, was 
allotted to the professors and to the students, 
"until the patrons should find room for a 
different arrangement in this particular." 

"A Short and General Confession of the 
True Christian Religion, According to God's 
Word," was prepared; to which all those 
who received degrees from the College were 
compelled to subscribe. " The Additional 
Laws " of 1 701 required the students to con- 
vene on the Lord's Day, in their classes, 
after session, to be exercised in their sacred 
lessons. And on all days to show proper 
example to others, by their piety, goodness, 
modesty, and diligence in learning. 

But in modern times, and in all these 
Scottish non-residential colleges, there are 
no rules regarding church-going. That, in 
Scotland, is accepted as a matter of course. 



lo Scottish Universities 

The nucleus of the University Library 
was the three hundred volumes left by a 
certain Mr. Clement Littil, or Little, to the 
Town Council of Edinburgh, in 1580. In 
each book is the neatly printed inscription 
"I am given to Edinburgh, and Kirk o' 
God, by Maister Clement Litil. There to 
Remain. ' ' With the private library of Haw- 
thornden, bequeathed in 1627 by William 
Drummond, the friend and interviewer of 
** Royal Ben" Jonson, these volumes are 
now kept carefully locked away in a small 
room, off the hall, where they are half for- 
gotten, and are rarely seen by the book- 
loving and book-worshipping men whose 
hearts they would delight. They are ex- 
ceedingly rare autographs, and annotated; 
first editions, generally beautifully bound, 
most of them beyond price, some of them 
absolutely unique. Alas ! they do no good 
to anybody now, except to the very few 
visitors to the University who, learning of 
their existence, beg for a sight, or a 
touch, of them, a request which is always 



Edinburgh 1 1 

graciously granted. But there they are 
"to remain." 

The Library has other rich treasures, all 
as carefully kept from public, or apprecia- 
tive, view; the Shaksperiana collected by 
Halliwell-Phillipps, to whom the University 
once gave an honorary degree ; the generally 
accepted original manuscripts of John Knox's 
History of the Reformation ; Thomas Car- 
lyle's holograph deed of gift of Craigenput- 
tock, and the like. But they are as little 
known to the average Edinburgh man, in 
the University, or out of it, as are the 
manuscripts of The Poems of Ossian or of 
TJie Iliad of Homer ; notwithstanding the 
fact that they are of far more sentimental 
value, if not of far more intrinsic value, than 
are all the Crown jewels in the Castle, un- 
earthed by the author of Marmion^ who 
must have revered the Laird of Hawthorn- 
den as much as he reverenced the common- 
place wearers of the regalia of Scotland. 

The first patrons of the establishment at 
Edinburgh evidently intended that every 



12 Scottish Universities 

student should be lodged within its walls, 
and should remain there by night, as well 
as by day. And it was ordered that all 
undergraduates should wear gowns, under 
pain of expulsion. For a number of years, 
as many of the students as the College would 
hold, were, certainly, housed inside its gates. 
But the custom gradually went into disuse, 
and it has never since prevailed. 

The rent of chambers in that early period 
was four pounds, if the student demanded a 
bed to himself; two pounds each person, if 
two occupied one couch. In later times, 
according to *' Jupiter," otherwise Alexan- 
der, Carlyle, ** living in Edinburgh con- 
tinued still [1743] to be wonderfully cheap; 
as there were ordinaries for young gentlemen 
at fourpence a head, for a very good dinner 
of broth and beef, and a roast and potatoes, 
every day, with fish three or four times a 
week ; and all the small-beer that was called 
for until the cloth was removed." 

Within a few years, an institution calling 
itself ''University Hall" has opened a very 




OLD COLLEGE, EDINBURGH. 



Edinburgh 13 

limited number of houses for the accommo- 
dation of students of both sexes, where are 
bed-rooms, studies, common dining, and 
recreation, or meeting, rooms. The Hall is 
managed internally by a committee of the 
residents, elected by themselves, and by 
each other, for short terms. The board and 
lodging cost comparatively little. But, 
naturally, only a few, of either sex, can avail 
themselves of the limited privileges ex- 
tended. 

This University Hall system, however, is 
not under the control of the University 
authorities; and it is, such as it is, in its 
own small, recent way, almost the only thing 
approaching to University social home-life 
which the University has ever known. 

The Privy Council, in 1695, recommended 
that all masters and regents (regents were 
professors in the early days), and also the 
students of the several universities of the 
Kingdom, should be obliged to wear gowns 
during the time of the sittings of their col- 
leges. "The students to wear red gowns, 



14 Scottish Universities 

that thereby they may be discouraged from 
vageing or vice. 

The recommendation was not adopted in 
Edinburgh; nor, says Prof. Andrew Dalzel, 
in h\s History of the Institution, was it easy 
to see what advantage could attend the 
wearing of such a badge. The students 
were "discouraged from vice and vageing" 
by other means. 

But the professors at Edinburgh, to this 
day, lecture, always, in gowns; which is a 
pleasant, proper custom. 

"Vageing," it may be observed here, is 
defined by Jamieson in his Scottish Diction- 
ary, as "the habit of strolling idly" ; and he 
gives as his authority, Bovver's History of 
the University of Edinburgh. Johnson does 
not seem to have known the word; the 
nearest he came to it is, "to vagary, to gad, 
to remove often from place to place. ' ' And 
the Century Dictionary comes no nearer to 
it than "vagabond." "Vageing," evi- 
dently, in the argot of the present, was 
"loafing about." 



Edinburgh 15 

Some of the early laws for Edinburgh 
undergraduate guidance are worth recording. 
In 1668, it was enacted, by the regents, that 
the censors, in their respective classes, 
should observe such as "speak Scots, curse, 
swear, or have any obscene expressions, that 
the regent may censure them, according to 
the degree of their offence." For the sup- 
pression of tumults, for which the College 
then had a bad repute, it was ordained that 
none of the scholars should stand at the 
gate, or on the stairs, or in the passages to 
the classes; transgressors to be delated, 
every one of them to be fined two shillings 
"Scots"; a "shilling Scots" being of about 
the value of an English penny. 

It was also ordained that no scholar should 
be troublesome to another, by shouldering 
or tossing; for, seeing these were the occa- 
sions of fighting, whosoever should be found 
guilty of tossing would be amerced in four 
shillings ' * Scots. " " If a scholar should strike 
his neighbour, he was chastised, according 
to the demerit of the fault. If he should be 



i6 Scottish Universities 

deprehended playing, or carelessly walking 
up and down, in any of the courts, at the 
time of their meeting in their schools, for 
every fault he was mulcted in a shilling 
fine." 

Additional laws for the College, made in 
1701, provided that no student, "during 
hours," should walk idly in the courts; 
should play at hand-ball, billiards, or bowls, 
or the like. None were allowed to do, or 
to speak, wickedly, wrongfully, or ob- 
scenely; to indulge in "nasty talk." Such 
as "profaned God's sacred name, or vented 
horrid oaths," were to pay sixpence the first 
time ; and thereafter to be severely chastised. 
All students were to carry themselves re- 
spectfully towards the professors; and to 
obey their professors' injunctions. Those 
who transgressed were to be fined first in a 
penny; and after in two pence. Students 
were obliged to discourse, always, in Latin ; 
also to speak modestly, chastely, courte- 
ously, and in no manner uncivil or quar- 
relsome. If they spoke in English, or "in 



Edinburgh 17 

Scots," within the College, the charge was 
a penny for the first offence, two pence for 
every offence thereafter. They were ordered 
to carry no guns, swords, daggers, or such 
arms; to throw no snow-balls or stones at 
glass windows, or glass houses, or at walls, 
or at seats, or at desks, or at pulpits, or at 
anything else, or at anybody. They were to 
be discharged if they used cards, or dice, or 
raffling, or any such games of lottery. They 
were not permitted to enter taverns, or ale- 
houses, at any time of day ; and it was even 
against the rules for them to walk the streets 
of an evening ! 

How far these rules were enforced, two 
hundred years ago, especially "after hours," 
when the students, unmarked by red gowns 
and entirely unrecognisable, had absolute 
freedom of the city, is not now known. 
/ Edinburgh, in many respects, resembles 
the German, rather than the English, or the 
American, universities. The men are scat- 
tered in lodgings throughout the town ; 
they have little of class feeling or of social 



1 8 Scottish Universities 

life in common ; their ages vary greatly ; 
and "out of hours" they are subject to no 
scholastic discipline whatever. They know, 
personally, but few of their fellows, even by 
sight ; and they feel none of that love of 
Alma Mater, and of that devotion to her 
interests, which are so strongly developed 
in the men of Oxford and Cambridge, and 
in the men of every seat of learning, be it 
large or small, salt-air, or fresh-water, on 
the western side of the Atlantic. 

The loss is that of the Edinburgh man. 
And a great loss it is. 

He does not recognise the face of a class- 
mate when he meets him in after life. He 
has no college colours to wear. He has few 
college songs to stir his blood ; no college 
cheer to warm his heart, or to crack his 
voice ; no intercollegiate victory, or defeat, 
to rejoice over, or to try to explain away ; 
no Greek -letter or local college club to 
frequent; no class boy to pet, or to be 
proud of. He knows nothing of that en- 
thusiastic college spirit which means so 



Edinburgh 19 



much, in the New World, to every man 
who ever went to college, even for a single 
term; which means so much, also to his 
sisters, and to his cousins, and to his aunts. 

And the loss is that of the Edinburgh man ! 

A writer in the Scotsman, in 1884, said 
that the students at a Scottish university, 
even at that period, had little more cohesion 
among themselves than the grains of a sifting 
sand-heap. They drift into the same classes, 
he added ; but when the lecture is over, they 
fold up their note-books like the Arab, and 
as silently steal away. There was then, he 
complained, no common place of meeting, 
where a man might look upon the counten- 
ance of his friend, or hear the sound of a 
voice, which, in the class-room, must of a 
necessity be still. And he concluded by 
saying, that **it did not need natural or 
acquired misanthropy for a man to pass 
through an entire university course, and 
take a degree, without knowing a single 
fellow-student better than he did on the 
day of his first matriculation." 



20 Scottish Universities 

This was before the establishment of the 
University Union, based, in a way, up- 
on the Union Society of Oxford. "The 
Royal Medical," "The Speculative," "The 
Dialectic," "The Diagnostic," "The Philo- 
mathic," "The Chemical," "The Theologi- 
cal," "The Philosophical," and even "The 
Total Abstinence " societies, many of them 
of comparatively recent date, were already 
in existence, but small in membership ; and, 
as their names imply, limited and peculiarly 
special in scope. The Union, without 
effacing or absorbing these, is universal. It 
is open to all students and graduates of the 
University; and "its purpose is the pro- 
vision and maintenance of means of social 
and academic intercourse for its members." 
It is a students' club, with a very small 
entrance fee, and small annual dues. It has 
a commodious building of its own; it has 
all the conveniences of a club proper ; with 
the addition of a large hall, in which lectures 
are given, and in which debates are held. 
But it is still in its extreme infancy ; and it 



Edinburgh 21 

is, in its dull, cold, social way, about all 
that the very modern Edinburgh man has 
to cling to, for University entertainment and 
amusement. It was absolutely unknown to 
the Edinburgh man of two decades ago. 
And the loss is that of the Edinburgh man. 
Another interesting, and also very modern 
feature of the undergraduate life, in Edin- 
burgh, is the Students' Representative 
Council, instituted in 1883-4, "to represent 
the feeling and opinions of students, as oc- 
casion might arise, and to mediate between 
them and the University authorities." It 
consists of eighty members, elected by the 
students direct; and of fifty-two members, 
chosen by the different societies of students; 
and, in a measure, it controls and governs 
the Union. One of its interesting features 
is a weekly publication called The Student, 
which is devoted to "University Notes," to 
"Athletic Notes," and to "Society Notes"; 
these last relating, not to society in general, 
with a capital "S," but to the College so- 
cieties and associations mentioned above. 



2 2 Scottish Universities 

The graduates have space assigned to them, 
ill which they are invited to indulge in remi- 
niscences, personal and otherwise. Books 
are reviewed, and local and general musical 
and dramatic affairs receive a certain amount 
of attention. It is the only periodical of its 
kind peculiar to the University, as a uni- 
versity ; and it takes the place of the Literary 
Magazines, the Alumni Weeklies, the daily 
papers, and all the rest of the journals 
in which American undergraduates indulge 
themselves; and out of which they get so 
much comfort, and do so much good to 
themselves and to each other. 

The Students' Representative Council is 
not confined to Edinburgh alone ; it exists in 
the other institutions as well. A joint com- 
mittee of these Councils has published The 
Scottish Studenf s So?ig-Book, containing, in 
a single volume, all the lays and lyrics of all 
the universities. This volume is exceedingly 
comprehensive ; for it embraces the national 
airs, and the folk-music of every quarter of 
the globe, from The Russian Anthem to The 



Edinburgh 23 

Old Cabin Home. The college songs, proper 
and special, are not very many or very 
original, or very brilliant, notwithstanding 
the fact that Professor Blackie has furnished 
some of the words. They are set to familiar 
airs, ancient and modern, from Bonny Dundee 
to Upidee, from John Brown s Body to Sally 
in Our Alley. Sometimes they are purely 
personal; but usually they are general in 
character. One verse from a production 
entitled Our Noble-Selves, will give a fair idea 
of the style of composition of the whole; 
and will, also, show the broadness of the 
college spirit. 

** They talk about Arenas of the South, 
And eulogise the Isis and the Cam, 
While they glory in a Person or a Routh, 

The Harvard, and the Yale, of Uncle Sam. 
And possibly our rivals may amass 

More knowledge than the College by the 
Dee, 
But none of them can possibly surpass 

Our weather, and our heather, and our Sea." 

No college in the world can surpass 



24 Scottish Universities 

Aberdeen in the matter of sea and heather, 
perhaps ; but very few universities will care to 
attempt to rival her in the matter of climate. 

The Constitution of the University of 
Edinburgh seems, to the lay mind, to be a 
most complicated document. As it is en- 
tirely unlike anything of its kind known on 
the western side of the Atlantic, some short, 
but comprehensive, digest of its scope and 
contents, dug out of the annual University 
Calendar, may be of interest here. We 
learn, in a vague sort of way, that the Uni- 
versity is a corporation consisting of a 
Chancellor, of a Vice-Chancellor, of a Rector, 
of a Principal (or President), of professors, 
of registered graduates and alumni, and of 
matriculated students. The Chancellor, we 
are told, is elected by the General Council 
"for life." Changes in the ordinances and 
in University arrangements, proposed, or 
approved by the University Court, must 
receive his sanction. And he confers 
degrees. 

The General Council and the University 



Edinburgh 25 

Court have many pages of the Calendar de- 
voted to their functions. The University 
Court consists of the Rector, the Principal, 
the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, and of a 
number of ' * Assessors, ' 'variously appointed. 
The General Council is composed of the 
Chancellor, of the members of the Univer- 
sity Court, of professors, and of registered 
graduates. The Vice-Chancellor, nominated 
by the Chancellor, may, in absence of the 
Chancellor, confer degrees ; but he may not 
discharge any other of the Chancellor's 
duties. The Principal, formerly elected by 
the Town Council, but now by the curators, 
also holds his office * * for life. ' ' The curators 
number seven, three nominated by the Uni- 
versity Court, and four by the Town Council. 
They retain the position for three years. 

The Rector is elected by the matriculated 
students of the University, on such days in 
October, or November, as may be fixed by 
the University Court ; and he is president of 
that particular body. All of which sounds 
most complex and perplexing. 



26 Scottish Universities 

Rev. Menzies Fergusson, in an interesting 
little book entitled My College Days, pub- 
lished in 1887, tells the story of a Rectorial 
contest in Edinburgh when he was a student 
there, some twenty years ago. The candi- 
dates that year were men of high standing 
in the Whig and Tory parties, but seem- 
ingly of small importance in the world of 
letters. Young Fergusson, a Bejan, just ma- 
triculated, a stranger to Edinburgh, and to 
almost every person in Edinburgh, and 
quite indifferent as to candidates and to 
parties, was at once beset by students, en- 
thusiastic on one side or the other, to de- 
clare his intentions. He does not say for 
whom he voted ; but he describes the elec- 
tioneering proceedings in a graphic way. 
Meetings innumerable were held ; speeches 
without number were made ; squibs and car- 
toons were scattered broadcast ; songs were 
composed, and circulated, and sung; the 
rival factions formed themselves into oppos- 
ing battalions, and gathered around the 
statue of Sir David Brewster, in the great 



Edinburgh 27 

Court-yard, where were shouting, and push- 
ing, and hauling, and some mauling done, 
to the serious damage of hats and clothes, 
although only one warrior seems to have re- 
ceived personal injuries ; and he, it is gravely 
reported, "soon recovered from his swoon." 

After the battle, both sides united in a 
torchlight procession, marching shoulder to 
shoulder, in perfect harmony and good 
humour, to do honour to the new Lord 
Rector, who was to hold his office for the 
customary three years. 

The only persons who appear to have 
profited by the contests were the tailors and 
the hatters; and the greatest sufferers, nat- 
urally, were the parents and guardians, who 
had to pay the bills. 

All this drew the student-body closer to- 
gether, for the time ; but it does not appear 
to have inspired anything like what the 
Americans call "class feeling" or "college 
spirit." 

One of the best pictures extant of what 
Scottish university life was, and was not, a 



28 Scottish Universities 

hundred years ago, is painted by Froude in 
the first volume of his Life of Thomas Car- 
lyle. He said, in effect, and in part, that in 
English ears, the words, "college days" 
suggest splendid buildings, luxurious rooms, 
and rich endowments, as the reward of 
successful industry. In Oxford and in 
Cambridge, the students were young men 
between nineteen and twenty-three, who 
enjoyed themselves in every possible social 
way, and who spent handsome allowances. 
These allowances, on an average, were 
double in amount per annum the sum which 
the father of Thomas Carlyle made in any 
one year of his hard-working life. 

The universities north of the Tweed, on 
the other hand, in Carlyle's time, the second 
decade of the nineteenth century, had no 
prizes to offer, no fellowships, no scholar- 
ships; they had nothing whatever to give 
but an education, and the teaching of severe 
lessons in the discipline of poverty and self- 
denial. 

The students, as a rule, were the sons of 




THOMAS CARLYLE. 



Edinburgh 29 

poor parents who realised, exactly, the ex- 
pense of a college course, and who knew how 
well, or how ill, it could be afforded. And 
the lads went to Aberdeen, to Edinburgh, 
to Glasgow, or to St. Andrews with a fixed 
purpose of reaching the very best of results, 
at the lowest possible money cost. 

They selected, generally, the institution 
nearest to their own humble homes, in order 
to save charges of travel ; they often walked 
to their destination, in order to avoid coach- 
hire ; they had no one to look after them on 
their journey, or at their journey's end. 
They entered their own names on their col- 
lege books; they found lodgings for them- 
selves, in some near-by street or alley ; they 
not infrequently cooked their own food, 
which was brought with them, or sent after 
them, in the carts of local carriers; some- 
times they made their own beds, and washed 
their own dishes and their own clothes ; and 
they were rarely over fourteen years of age 
when their college careers began. They 
formed very few, but always economical. 



30 Scottish Universities 

friendships; they shared their rooms, and 
their meals, and their thoughts with each 
other; they had their simple little clubs and 
societies for conversation or discussion ; they 
read hard, they worked hard ; hard was their 
life. Their very poverty kept them out of 
debt, and out of temptation to unwholesome 
habits and amusements, and when the term 
was over, they walked home to their own 
firesides, to make money enough, during 
the vacation, by teaching, or even by field- 
labour, to carry them back to their uni- 
versity, and to keep them there for another 
session. 

As a training in self-dependence, said 
Froude, no better education could have 
been found in the British Islands. And 
he asserted that if the teaching could have 
been as good as was the discipline of char- 
acter, the Scottish universities might have 
competed with any in the world. But he de- 
clared that the teaching was the weak point. 
There were no provisions made by the col- 
leges to furnish personal instruction, as in the 



Edinburgh 31 

sister institutions in England ; the professors 
were, individually, excellent; but they had 
to lecture to large classes, and they had no 
time to attend, particularly, to any individual 
student. The Scottish universities, he con- 
cluded, were nothing more than opportuni- 
ties offered to lads who were able, and ready, 
to take advantage of the opportunities which 
they sought, or which came in their way. 

This, no doubt, was true enough when the 
lad Carlyle, towards the close of his thir- 
teenth year, tramped a hundred miles from 
Ecclefechan to Edinburgh in 1809; ^^'^^y ^^^ 
a measure, it is true now; but it is not the 
whole truth, and the four Scottish universi- 
ties to-day hold their own, very nobly, 
among the modern universities of the world. 

The Rev. James Sharp, Minister of the 
Established Church of Scotland, at Mussel- 
burgh, near Edinburgh, in a personal note, 
has kindly set down for the benefit of the 
readers of this volume the story of his own 
student life in Edinburgh, during full courses 
of Arts and Divinity, from the autumn of 



32 Scottish Universities 

1877 until the summer of 1885. His words 
are quoted here in full : 

" To the intending student in my time," he 
writes, " two ways of finding out how to make a 
start at the University were available. To wit 
— from a student who had already been there, 
or from the Umve?'stty Calendar^ the intricacies 
of which presupposed graduation for the full 
understanding of the same. 

"A considerable railway journey, in most 
cases, to an unknown city was necessary. 
Never seen Edinburgh before? No? Go in 
the daylight, leave your box at the station, and 
then hunt for lodgings. After weary wander- 
ings, you venture to ring the bell of the base- 
ment door of a tenement house, in the windows 
of which you have seen the ticket of strange 
and familiar device, — 'Lodgings to Let, for 
Single Gentlemen'; with another to keep it 
company, containing the announcement, 'Man- 
gling Done Here.' In our case," says Mr. 
Sharp, "the door was opened by a widow lady 
who smiled upon her innocent country victims. 
We were shown the establishment, and we fixed 
upon a parlour and a bed-room, two of us 'dig- 
ging' together. The price for each, with board, 
was about twelve shillings a week. 'But before 
we bargain,' said the now businesslike landlady, 



Edinburgh 33 

* I want to ken what kind o' students ye are.' 
*0h,' we replied, 'we will try to give you as 
little trouble as possible.' 'But are ye Medical 
or Deveenity?' * We are just entering Arts.' 
'Aye! ye have plenty o' arts about ye. But it 's 
a 'richt. I can manage Medicals: but those 
Deveenities are wild deevils! ' 

" Back to the station for our boxes was our 
next step. These boxes, among other necessary 
things, contained scones, bannocks, jam, and 
the hke; the forethought of a kind mother who 
realised how much her laddie would miss these 
home-comforts in the Capital. 

"Next morning we speered our way to the 
University, and arriving there, we entered its 
portals with trembling steps. The bedellus was 
six feet four inches in height; and we cried up 
to him to direct us to the Matriculation Office. 
This haughty beadel is believed to have spoken 
invariably of the College Staff as ' We and the 
ither professors.' The matriculation fee was 
one pound, one shilling; and the card we re- 
ceived gave us entrance to any class. For at that 
time, there were no entrance examinations to 
the University. I chose the Arts course, as 
qualifying me for Divinity. The fee for each 
class was three guineas; and the occasion of 
paying that fee was the one opportunity the 
student had of speaking to his professor, unless 



34 Scottish Universities 

the student was called to the professor's room 
for misbehaviour. The classes contained some 
two hundred men each; so that it was difficult 
for the teacher to know, by name, or by face, 
more than a very few of the taught ; and he sel- 
dom attempted to do more than that. Only one 
Professor (Calderwood), during the whole Arts 
course, invited us to his house, and not many 
went; so unsocial and so uncouth is the average 
Scottish youth. This Professor [Calderwood] 
knew almost every student by name; and he 
never passed any of us in the streets without re- 
cognition. But he was considered very singular! 

" There were several debating societies which 
met in the evenings, in one of the class-rooms; 
but they were not largely attended. This, for 
all that, was the only means whereby we could 
have any association with each other, when the 
studies of the day were over. There was no 
Union then, such as there is now. We scattered 
in all directions to get our luncheons; and we 
generally dined in our lodgings, at the close of 
the College-day's work. 

** There was really no student social life. The 
most of the time in the evenings was spent in 
lonely study, at home, preparing for the classes 
on the coming days. The undergraduate was 
cast upon the city without a soul to care for him. 
Sometimes a minister would call upon him; and 



Edinburgh 35 

occasionally, if he were serious-minded, the 
Young Men's Christian Association would get 
hold of him and put him in the way of making 
friends of the right sort. On Sundays there 
was no Church service which was especially 
adapted to him or to his wants. There is no 
College chapel in Edinburgh. 

'* In the Theological Faculty, when I reached 
that, there was more sociability. The classes 
were small, and the professors, having all been 
ministers themselves, took a particular interest 
in the pupils, who were going forward to the 
ministry. Every one of the divinity students 
was familiar with, and familiar to, his professor; 
and was made welcome at his professors' homes. 

" Great improvements have taken place in 
Edinburgh, since my time, and in many ways. 
The Union brings the men more closely together, 
and there are now students' cricket clubs, foot- 
ball clubs, tennis clubs, golf clubs, and the like. 
But, so far as I know, there is no further ad- 
vance of the undergraduates towards personal 
contact with their professors. 

** Perhaps the philosophy of the whole thing is 
this. The Scotch are gregarious in every coun- 
try save their own. They do not care for much 
sociability. At least those lads do not, who are 
away from their own parishes. The Scottish 
student, generally, is drawn from a class of the 



36 Scottish Universities 

population which has hard fights to make both 
ends meet. He must work with all his might to 
obtain a bursary [or scholarship], and thus to 
save his father's pockets and his mother's scones. 
** We used to get a holiday from the Theologi- 
cal Faculty on the first Monday of every month. 
This was called 'Meal Monday,' because it 
enabled the students to go home to replenish 
their barrels. Dear old times! No luxuries. 
The liberal arts, sciences, and theology were 
cultivated on oatmeal, with an occasional glass 
of beer on a Saturday night." 

*'I do not remember anything more that is 
worth saying," concludes Mr. Sharp. But 
he has remembered a good deal that is worth 
hearing, concerning the life in his own Uni- 
versity not so very many years ago. There 
is not space enough here to enumerate all the 
men of letters who have made the Univer- 
sity of Edinburgh, or whom the University 
of Edinburgh has made. Its list of gradu- 
ates is as long as is the Moral Law, which it 
has taught to its graduates, and which most 
of its graduates have taught, in some form 
or other, to the world at large. They have 



Edinburgh 37 

turned out songs, those Edinburgh men, and 
they have turned out sermons, innumerable ; 
sermons predominating. But they have 
turned out very little that has not lived, or 
that is not worth living. 

Concerning some of the distinguished sons 
of Edinburgh, as showing what they did in 
the University, and what the University, in 
its own peculiar way, did for them, a few 
words may be said. These words will illus- 
trate further, perhaps, the scope and the 
methods, the manners and the customs, of 
the Institution from the time of its founda- 
tion, down to a period within the memory 
of men still living. 

Almost nothing is known of the early life 
of William Drummond of Hawthornden, 
the friend of "Royal Ben" Jonson, and 
probably the earliest literary son of his Alma 
Mater, except the fact that he received the 
rudiments of his education at the High 
School, in Edinburgh, where he is said to 
have displayed precocious signs of worth and 
genius. In due time, he took his degree 



38 Scottish Universities 

of M.A. after the usual course of study 
in Edinburgh University. He was well 
versed in the metaphysical learning of the 
period ; and he devoted himself, even at 
college, to the study of the classical authors 
of antiquity; which may account for the 
purity and elegance of his style. The first 
edition of his Poems was published in 1616, 
three years before the memorable visit of 
Jonson, and when Drummond was over 
thirty. How far he lisped in numbers, be- 
fore he was graduated, is not clear ; but how 
much he loved his College has been shown 
in his liberal bequests to its library. 

James Thomson made his first appearance 
in Edinburgh on horseback, riding behind a 
servant of his father. He walked home the 
next day, alone, not liking the looks of 
things; and he is said to have reached the 
paternal manse, some fifty or sixty miles 
distant, before the return of the servant and 
the horse. His second visit was more pro- 
longed. Somewhat contrary to his own in- 
clination, he was induced to study divinity; 




WILLIAM DRUMMOND. 



Edinburgh 39 

but being rebuked by a professor for the 
flowery and poetic nature of a probationary 
exercise delivered in the hall, he retired from 
the consideration of theology in disgust. 

During his undergraduate days, he tutored 
the son of an earl, and contributed certain 
verses to a poetical volume called The Edin- 
boroiigh Miscellany. A friend of the family, 
"finding him unlikely to do well in any other 
pursuit, advised him to try his fortune as 
a poet in London, and promised him some 
countenance and support. ' ' Accordingly he 
journeyed South, with almost nothing in his 
pocket but the first poem of The Seasons — 
Winter, which he sold for three guineas. 
It consisted, originally, of four hundred and 
thirteen lines, and was published when its 
author was twenty-six years of age. 

A penny-ha'-penny a line does not seem 
to be a very great price for a poem which 
has lived so long as has this particular Winter 
of Thomson's. Autnnin, "nodding o'er the 
yellow plain," was written later, and brought 
a little larger sum. 



40 Scottish Universities 

David Mallet was a friend and classmate of 
Thomson's at Edinburgh. He must have 
been a hardworking and a diligent student, 
for his professors recommended him, and 
cordially, as a private tutor to the children 
of the Duke of Montrose. This was an un- 
usual proceeding, except when accompanied 
by unusual ability ; especially in the case of 
a man absolutely obscure of birth, Mallet's 
father being the keeper of a small public- 
house, on the borders of the Highlands. 
The son seems to have been sensitive upon 
the subject of his extraction; for he at- 
tempted, carefully, to conceal from the world 
all the particulars of his origin, and of his 
early career, including even the story of 
his college life. He was a poet of some 
contemporary merit ; and he disputed with 
Thomson the authorship of Rule Britannia, 
contained in a play called A If red, which they 
wrote in collaboration. It is rather interest- 
ing to contemplate the fact that one of the 
various British national anthems is claimed 
by two Scotsmen, both of the University of 



Edinburgh 41 

Edinburgh. But the song has lasted nearly 
a couple of centuries; and the Britons of 
both sides of the Border, who still assert that 
they "rule the waves," have not yet become 
tired of saying so in the words of Mallet, or 
of Thomson. 

"I passed through the ordinary course of 
education with success," wrote David Hume, 
on his death-bed, in 1776, "and was seized, 
early, with a passion for literature, which has 
been the ruling passion of my life, and the great 
source of enjoyment. My studious disposition, 
my sobriety, and my industry gave my family a 
notion that the law was a proper profession for 
me, but I found an unsurmountable aversion to 
everything but the pursuits of philosophy and 
general learning." 

Elsewhere in this interesting fragment of 
autobiography, Hume remarked, that "it is 
difficult for a man to speak long of himself, 
without vanity," which will account for his 
allusions to his own industry, to his own 
sobriety, and to his studious disposition; 
all of them most admirable qualities in an 
undergraduate, when they are exploited by 



42 Scottish Universities 

somebody else. However, Hume seems to 
have exhibited every one of these qualities 
while a student at Edinburgh University, 
according to the testimony of his contem- 
poraries; and to have been a credit to his 
Alma Mater. 

Hugh Blair, Doctor of Divinity, must be 
considered here as a literary landmark of the 
University of Edinburgh, because his con- 
temporaries looked upon him not only as one 
of the most eminent of divines, but also as 
one of the most illustrious "Cultivators of 
Polite Letters" who figured in the cultivated 
eighteenth century. His father perceived, 
early in the boy's career, that the boy pos- 
sessed seeds of genius: and the boy, in 1730, 
when he was twelve years of age, was sent 
to the College in order to have the seeds of 
genius watered and developed. He is said 
to have remained in the University for eleven 
years, studying diligently all the time ; and 
he did not receive his degree of M. A. until 
1739. He devoted himself particularly to 
history in his undergraduate days; and, with 



Edinburgh 43 

some of his youthful associates, he devised 
and constructed a most comprehensive 
scheme of chronological tables, for recording, 
in their proper places, all important and far- 
reaching events. This work, a very serious 
and unusual production for undergraduate 
pens, was afterwards elaborated by another 
hand, and given to the public as the once 
familiar Chronological History of the World. 

Blair was not strong of health in his boy- 
hood, and he was better able, therefore, to 
resist those attractions of physical excite- 
ment which were to be found outside the 
class-rooms. In later life, he was so success- 
ful in his lectures on English composition, 
before the University, that George Third, 
or his Ministers, erected and endowed for 
him a special Chair of Rhetoric and Belles- 
Lettres, making him "Regius Professor" 
thereof, with a handsome salary and pension. 

On account of his provincial accent, and 
of certain defects in the organs of pro- 
nunciation, we are told that his sermons and 
lectures were better in print than on the 



44 Scottish Universities 

platform ; and that, thanks to his pension, 
he was probably the first clergyman who 
ever "set-up " a carriage in Scotland! 

John Home, called in the encyclopedias 
"an eminent dramatic poet," was the author 
of one eminently successful tragedy, Doiig- 
laSy and of three less popular tragedies, 
Aloiizo, Alfred, and The Fatal Discovery, 
which are now altogether forgotten. 

He was born on the banks of the Firth of 
Forth, and his father, who was Town Clerk 
of Leith, is not supposed to have had any 
flocks of his own to feed, outside the family 
circle. Home was a graduate of Edinburgh, 
where his ability, his progress in the study of 
literature, and his charm of manner made 
him exceedingly popular. His biographer, 
Mackenzie, tells us that "his temper was of 
that warm, susceptible kind, which is caught 
by the heroic and the tender; and that his 
favourite model of character was the imagin- 
ary 'Young Norval' of the play, upon 
whom he attempted to form himself, a char- 
acter endowed with chivalrous valour and 



Edinburgh 45 

romantic generosity." He saw good in 
everybody, put his friends upon higher 
pedestals than Nature had built for them ; 
and he liked to be praised as much as he 
loved to bestow praise upon others. 

He played the titular part in the famous 
amateur representation of Douglas, described 
in the sketch of Adam Ferguson, given below. 

An intimate friend of Home's at the Uni- 
versity was William Robertson, the his- 
torian. He entered college at the age of 
twelve; and he must have distinguished 
himself there as he distinguished himself 
everywhere else. His monumental work 
appeared before he was forty, to the great 
admiration and surprise of Horatio Walpole, 
who said that he could not understand how 
a man whose spoken dialect was so uncouth 
to English ears, could write such fine and 
perfect English; forgetting that they teach 
English in Edinburgh. 

Robertson became Principal of the Uni- 
versity in 1762, and he held the position 
until he died thirty-one years later. He 



4^ Scottish Universities 

established the Library Fund, he was very 
instrumental in giving the University its 
"New Buildings," and he made the College 
so important in the eyes of studious men 
that he drew to it many serious-minded 
undergraduates from Oxford and Cambridge. 

Adam Ferguson, a graduate of St. An- 
drews, became Professor of Natural Philo- 
sophy in Edinburgh in 1759; and in 1764, 
Professor of Moral Philosophy, a chair much 
better suited to his tastes, and to the course 
of study which he had followed. 

During these Edinburgh days, he enjoyed, 
and ornamented, the intellectual society, for 
which the Northern Capital was distinguished 
in the last half of the eighteenth century. 
"Edinburgh is a hot-bed of genius," wrote 
Tobias Smollett, in Humphry Clinker, "I 
have the good fortune to be made acquainted 
with many authors of the first distinction 
[including Ferguson], and I have found them 
all as agreeable in conversation as they are 
instructive and entertaining in their writ- 
ings." 



Edinburgh 47 

Smollett might have added that they were, 
as well, sometimes playful in conduct; for 
there is a tradition extant that the tragedy 
of Douglas^ by the Rev. John Home, was 
once produced in private in Edinburgh, with 
the author in the titular part and Adam 
Ferguson as **Lady Randolph." A Pro- 
fessor of Natural, and of Moral, Philosophy, 
figuring as "the leading lady" in an amateur 
dramatic company of grave and reverend 
college Dons must have been an instructive 
and entertaining spectacle to any critical 
undergraduate who chanced to be in the 
audience. Whether or not the "Lady Ran- 
dolph," or the "Anna," of the cast, the 
latter played by the Rev. Hugh Blair, was 
in proper and appropriate female costume 
on that occasion, is not recorded. 

Professor Ferguson was instrumental in 
bringing together the two popular poets of 
Scotland, for the first and only time. Walter 
Scott, a lad of fifteen, in 1786-87, had the 
rare good fortune, a good fortune which he 
thoroughly appreciated, to be noticed by 



4^ Scottish Universities 

Burns in Adam Ferguson's house. **Of 
course," wrote Scott, "we youngsters sat 
silent and looked and listened." Burns was 
attracted by some lines on the bottom of a 
print on the walls of the room, and asked 
who was their author. Nobody knew but 
the little, silent, and listening Scott, who 
whispered the information, "Langhorne." 
"Burns rewarded me with a glance and a 
word," added Scott, "which, though of 
mere civility, I then received and still recol- 
lect with great pleasure. ... I never 
saw him again, except in the street, when 
he did not recognise me, as I could not ex- 
pect he should." 

And so the "glance," full of reverence on 
the one hand, and full of sympathy on the 
other, was returned; and Adam Ferguson's 
house, to quote some now forgotten poet, 
was "the spot where Robert Burns ordained 
Sir Walter Scott!" 

A contemporary of these men at the Uni- 
versity was John Witherspoon. He became 
President of the College of New Jersey, at 



Edinburgh 49 

Princeton, in 1768; he lived and dared to 
sign the Declaration of Independence, eight 
years later; but he has made more record 
for himself as a teacher of youth in the New 
World, than as one of the taught in the Old. 

Dugald Stewart was most emphatically a 
university man. His father being Professor 
of Mathematics at Edinburgh, the boy was 
born in the house assigned to the head of 
the Mathematical Faculty, in the very build- 
ings of the College. At the proper time, 
he became a student of his father ; later, he 
was assistant to his father; and, in 1785, he 
succeeded Adam Ferguson in the Chair of 
Moral Philosophy. He did not relinquish 
his active duties in the University until 18 10, 
when he was fifty-seven years of age. 

Lord Cockburn said once: "To me, his 
[Dugald Stewart's] lectures were like the 
opening of the heavens. I felt that I had a 
soul. His noble views, imparted in glorious 
sentences, elevated me into a higher world." 

Although Adam Smith was closely as- 
sociated with Glasgow, as a student there for 



50 Scottish Universities 

a few years, and as a professor for many 
years, he lectured on belles-lettres and on 
rhetoric at Edinburgh in 1748, when he was 
twenty-five years of age. 

Henry Mackenzie, "the Man of Feeling," 
was a resident of the Edinburgh of the period 
of Adam Ferguson and Hugh Blair, and 
Adam Smith, and Home, and Hume, al- 
though not of their day at the University. 
He survived them all, living into the third 
decade of the nineteenth century ; and, like 
the rest of them, he went in, and out, of 
college without leaving any very tangible 
impression as an undergraduate. 

Oliver Goldsmith, in the minds of men, is 
rarely associated with Edinburgh. Trinity 
College, Dublin, still claims him with pride, 
as one of her sons. But he went to Edin- 
burgh in the autumn of 1752, to take a 
course in medicine and anatomy ; where he 
distinguished himself, chiefly, by his amus- 
ing simplicity of character, and by his curi- 
ous and entertaining absence of mind. But 
he seems to have been almost as fond of 



Edinburgh 5 1 

chemistry as of fun. He was as poor in 
purse as he was rich in the faculty of social 
enjoyment. Early in his career he became 
a member of a students' club called "The 
Medical Society," where he told inimitable 
Irish stories, sang delightful Irish songs, and, 
probably, danced fantastic Irish jigs; mak- 
ing himself immensely popular in his own 
particular circle. "I sit down and laugh at 
the world and at myself, one of the most 
ridiculous objects in it," he wrote, in one 
of his home letters. He is supposed to have 
tried to make a little money by private 
tuition. But he did not find himself in 
entire sympathy with Scotland or with the 
Scots, in general, and, at the end of eighteen 
months he journeyed to the Continent, to 
finish his studies among more congenial 
surroundings. The Scots and Scotland left 
but little impression upon his literary work; 
although he wrote from Leyden that logic 
was by no means taught so well there as in 
Edinburgh. 
Another Edinburgh man, concerning whom 



52 Scottish Universities 

a great deal is said, in these days, and about 
whom almost nothing is known, was James 
Boswell, the author of the Life of Samuel 
Johnson, an immortal book, and, most as- 
suredly, a landmark in literature. He en- 
tered the University at the usual early age; 
but he distinguished himself, particularly, 
outside the College gates, and in a social 
way. He shone in high life, and he was 
particularly fond of the stage and of stage- 
folk. While he was still an undergraduate, 
he wrote the prologue for what he supposed 
to be an original play, presented by a certain 
dame of quality, who was "in his set," and 
who wished to conceal her identity as a 
dramatic author. When the comedy was 
produced in public, it proved to be not only 
a gross plagiarism, but an utter failure. Both 
the failure and the plagiarism were attributed 
to Boswell; and he was gentleman enough 
to bear Lady Houston's burden, and to keep 
the secret, at his own great social expense, 
until the Lady, seeing the ridicule heaped 
upon him, was lady enough to confess it all. 




JAMES BOSWELL. 



Edinburgh 53 

During his university days, he began to 
show a taste for literary composition ; and 
in an early poem of his signed, in print, with 
his own initials, he thus speaks, modestly 
enough, of himself: 

" Boswell does women adore, 

And never means once to deceive. 

" He has all the bright fancy of youth, 
With the judgment of forty-and-five. 
In short, to declare the plain truth, 
There is no better fellow alive." 

He was six-and-forty when The Tour to 
the Hebrides appeared ; and no little of the 
bright fancy of his youth, perhaps, was con- 
tained in the Johnson, published when the 
adorer of Johnson was fifty-one. 

The two Scottish men of letters who are 
the most interesting and absorbing figures 
in literature, are Burns and Scott. Burns 
never knew the advantages of a college edu- 
cation, or of much schooling of any kind. 
Scott, for a time, was a student of the Uni- 
versity of Edinburgh. Burns was a genius. 



54 Scottish Universities 

but not, altogether, a gentleman. Scott 
was a gentleman and almost a genius. Burns 
wrote from the heart ; Scott from the heart 
and from the head, too. Perhaps Burns, as 
a genius, was greater than Scott, and will 
live longer. It may be that Scott, all gentle- 
man and half genius, will stand side by side 
with Burns, "when the Judgment-Books un- 
fold." Mr. Joseph Jefferson, the player, in 
his refutation of the theory that there was 
no Shakspere, says, in effect — the quotation 
is from memory — that 

" The scholar Bacon was a man of knowledge, 
But inspiration does not come from College! " 

How much of Scott's inspiration was in- 
spired by his short college course, it is not 
easy to determine. But Scott was an Edin- 
burgh man. 

Fortunately for the young Scott he had 
not so far to walk to the University as had 
so many of his contemporaries, for his 
father's house, on George Square, was but 
a few steps away. And, unfortunately for 



Edinburgh 55 

present interest, he had more to say of his 
school-days in the bit of early Autobiography 
which Lockhart preserved, than of his col- 
lege life. He left the high school, he wrote, 
"with a great quantity of general informa- 
tion, ill-arranged, and collected without sys- 
tem, yet deeply impressed upon his mind ; 
readily assorted by his power of connection 
and memory, and gilded," he added, "by a 
vivid and active imagination." His appe- 
tite for books was a sample, and as indis- 
criminating, as it was indefatigable; and he 
always felt that few persons of his age had 
read so much as he had read, and to so little 
purpose. The world has good reason to be 
glad that he read so much; and to doubt 
that the results were little ! 

With this small preparation, he entered 
the University in 1783, in the Humanity 
class, where he confessed that he speedily 
lost much that he had learned before. He 
might have done better in the Greek class, 
under a better and stricter master, he 
thought ; but he had no knowledge of Greek 



56 Scottish Universities 

to start with, and falling, naturally, behind 
his fellow-students, on that account he saw 
— the statement is his own — "no stronger 
means of vindicating his equality than by 
professing his contempt for the language, 
and his resolution not to learn it." 

He made some progress in ethics; he 
was instructed in moral philosophy, under 
Dugald Stewart ; and, to sum up his aca- 
demical studies, he attended the classes in 
history, and in civil and municipal law. 
His university course, therefore, was not 
brilliant or particularly creditable, perhaps, 
because of this more than smattering of "in- 
spiration " which possessed him. His views 
upon the subject of scholarship, given when 
he was more mature in mind, must be quoted 
in full: 



" If it should ever fall to the lot of youth to 
peruse these pages" [of Autobiography], he 
wrote, when he was thirty-seven years of age — 
"If it should ever fall to the lot of youth to 
peruse these pages, let such a reader remember 
that it is with deepest regret that I recollect, in 



Edinburgh 57 

my manhood, the opportunities of learning which 
I neglected in my youth; that through every 
part of my literary career I have felt pinched 
and hampered by my own ignorance ; and that I 
would, at this moment, give half the reputation 
I have had the good fortune to acquire, if by so 
doing I could rest the remaining part upon a 
sound foundation of learning and science." 

Scott, if he had lived longer, might have 
claimed the University as his very cradle. 
He was born **at the top," of the College 
Wynd, now called Guthrie Street. The 
house was opposite the Old Gate of the Old 
University ; and it was demolished to make 
way for the New University Buildings. 

Professor John Wilson in the University, 
"Kit North" out of the University, took 
the Chair of Moral Philosophy in 1820; and 
he occupied the chair for thirty-two years. 
There was unusual opposition to his election, 
on account of the eccentricities of his genius, 
the recklessness of his temper, and the gen- 
eral lack of fixedness in his purpose. But 
he was warmly supported by Walter Scott, 
who urged that the position would give 



58 Scottish Universities 

Wilson "the consistence and steadiness 
which were all he needed to make him the 
first man of the age." And thus, despite 
his curious impetuosity, and his carelessness 
of the morrow, he fought his way, by sheer 
force of talent, to an eminence of the highest 
moral and literary responsibility. 

An entire chapter might be devoted to 
Wilson, and a delightful task would be the 
writing of it, especially to one, who, as a 
very small boy indeed, remembers vaguely 
the familiar figure, the leonine head and 
face, the tall and massive form, as he saw 
Wilson stalking along Princes Street more 
than once, with his plaid about him, su- 
premely noticeable among noticeable men. 
** John Wilson," said some one of him once, 
"was the grandest specimen of the human 
form I have ever seen, tall, perfectly sym- 
metrical, massive, majestic, yet agile." 

His last public act was characteristic of 
the man. Broken in health, old in years, he 
struggled to Edinburgh, in order to record 
his vote for Macaulay, as University Member 



Edinburgh 59 

of Parliament, a man whom he felt that he 
had misjudged and misrepresented in pre- 
vious years. 

Mungo Park, as a school-boy at Selkirk, is 
reported to have made astonishing progress ; 
not only through his natural aptitude; but 
because of his great application and industry. 
He served as an apprentice to a Selkirk sur- 
geon for three years, before he went to 
Edinburgh, in 1789, when he was eighteen. 
There he remained for three successive ses- 
sions, taking the regular medical course, de- 
voting himself particularly to botany; and 
always working hard. 

Henry Brougham entered the University 
of Edinburgh in 1792, at the age of fourteen. 
He gave a chapter of his Autobiography to 
the subject of his college life, but he treats 
of his professors and of their methods, say- 
ing nothing of his personal career, except 
that he devoted himself to mathematics. It 
was ten or eleven years later when, in his 
own words, he perpetrated certain "high 
jinks" in the streets of the town. He 



6o Scottish Universities 

halted, with a party of congenial friends, in 
front of a chemist's shop, hoisted himself 
onto the shoulders of the tallest of his com- 
panions, ''placed himself on the top of the 
doorway, held on by the sign, and twisted 
off the venomous brazen serpent, which 
formed the explanatory announcement of 
the business that was carried on within." 

What a brazen serpent had to do with the 
selling and the compounding of drugs is 
not very clear now; but, if Brougham saw 
metallic vipers after he had started the Edm- 
burgh Review, and before he was twenty-five, 
it is not at all unlikely that he was familiar 
with "high jinks " of a similar character in 
his college days. The twisting off of signs 
seems to have been an important and a 
necessary part of the course of a British 
university man a hundred years ago. For- 
tunately that particular form of mental cul- 
ture is seriously neglected in the curriculum 
of modern seats of learning to-day. 

Brougham was elected Chancellor of the 
University of Edinburgh in October, 1859. 



Edinburgh 6i 

He delivered his Inaugural Address the next 
year. The history of his own times shows 
that he was, all his life, in the habit of climb- 
ing social, intellectual, and frivolous "jinks " 
of various altitudes, some of them, some- 
times, a little higher than his friends ap- 
proved of, and not always to his own credit. 
Mrs. Gordon, in her volume entitled The 
Home Life of Sir David Brewster, says very 
little about her father's experiences in col- 
lege, except that his university career was 
marked by brilliancy as well as by solidity ; 
that in 1793, at the age of twelve, he went 
up to Edinburgh, on foot, to be matricu- 
lated, and that it was his custom to walk 
backwards, and forwards, from Jedburgh to 
Edinburgh, and from Edinburgh to Jed- 
burgh, a distance of forty-five miles. In 
Jedburgh he was born in 1781, and in Jed- 
burgh he spent his early years. It is not 
easy to think of a Harvard man, or of a 
Yale man, or of a Princeton man, of twelve 
or fifteen, as walking, at the close of the col- 
lege session, from his campus to Portsmouth, 



62 Scottish Universities 

let us say, or to Rye, or to Philadelphia ; and 
then, on arrival at home, and before he went 
to bed, taking a walk of a few miles more, 
to talk things over with the boys of Kittery 
Point, the boys of New Rochelle, or the 
boys of Merion. Yet the young David 
Brewster thought very little of such a tramp ; 
and he tramped it more than once, in a single 
day. If they were not giants, in those times, 
they were, at least, pedestrians ; and the ex- 
press-train, the automobile, the trolley, and 
the bicycle are hardly in it. Their exercise 
did not require so much training as foot- 
ball, as baseball, or as track athletics; but 
perhaps it told in the end. 

Brewster as Vice-Chancellor of the Uni- 
versity presided at the installation of Lord 
Brougham, as Chancellor. He was Principal 
from i860 until he died in 1868. 

Carlyle, as we have seen elsewhere, tramped 
a hundred miles froni the paternal door-step, 
at Ecclefechan, to enter his own name on 
the books of the University of Edinburgh, 
in November, 1809. He did not reach the 




^^^., 



HENRY BROUGHAM. 



Edinburgh 63 

age of fourteen until the next month. His 
father, and his mother, to quote his own 
words, walked with him on the dark, frosty 
autumn morning to set him on his road ; his 
mother showing her "tremulous affection " 
at every step ; which is a way that mothers 
have! His companion, on his journey, was 
one "Tom" Smail, a youth slightly his 
senior, who had been at college before, and 
who was, therefore, considered a trustworthy 
guide. "Tom" Smail seems to have been a 
commonplace creature, conceited and of no 
account in the college world, or in the world 
at large. We hear no more concerning 
"Tom " Smail. His very name sounds like 
a joke. 

The two Thomases found dull, and for- 
lorn, and cheap lodgings in Simon Square, 
a dull and forlorn street, hardly changed 
during the century that has passed. Carlyle 
said that he learned very little at college, 
that in the classical field he was truly no- 
thing; his professors never noticing him, and 
never being able to distinguish him from 



64 Scottish Universities 

another Carlyle, who was "an older and a 
bigger boy, with red hair, wild buck-teeth, 
and scorched complexion ; and the worst 
Latinist" of Thomas Carlyle's acquaintance. 

The greater Carlyle does not seem to have 
done much better at philosophy ; and the 
only real progress he made was in mathe- 
matics. He carried off no prizes. He tried 
but once for a tangible reward of that sort, 
but, although he was well enough prepared, 
the noise, and the crowd, and the confusion 
of the class-room so distracted him that he 
gave up the attempt. 

Sartor Resartus is hardly autobiographical, 
but it contains a fair account of what college 
life was to its author, who declared that he 
felt it his duty to say that out of England 
and Spain his own was the worst of all 
hitherto discovered universities. But among 
eleven hundred Christian youths gathered 
together in one institution of learning, there 
were, perhaps, according to Carlyle, eleven 
willing to learn ; and Carlyle was one of that 
Edinburgh Eleven. "By collision" with 



Edinburgh 65 

the other, and the upper, few, a certain 
warmth, a certain polish, was communicated 
to him, he thought. By accident, and by 
happy instinct, he took less to rioting than 
to thinking and reading. And so the twig 
was bent. 

Carlyle became Rector of the University 
in 1865, commemorating his election by be- 
queathing, in true Carlylian language, his 
estate of Craigenputtock to found bursaries 
in the University. His reception by the 
students upon the occasion of the delivery 
of his Inaugural Address is said to have been 
very striking, and very affectionate. By 
reason of his age and physical feebleness he 
was unable to make his voice heard through- 
out the hall; and hundreds of patient men, 
who, perhaps, under similar circumstances, 
were never patient before, sat quietly and 
with deepest respect, unable to catch a word 
he said. 

This, remarks Sir Alexander Grant, his- 
torian of the University, was in strong con- 
trast with the too frequent exhibitions of 
s 



66 Scottish Universities 

undergraduate behaviour, when graceful and 
charming orations have been interrupted and 
made inaudible, and even brought to an end 
"by barbarous noises" [the phrase is his 
own], for which there was absolutely no 
reason, and no excuse. 

Thomas Guthrie, who, according to his 
own subsequent account, was always, as a 
boy, fond of fun and of fighting, entered 
the University of Edinburgh at the age of 
twelve; and he spent ten years of his life 
there. The first four were devoted to the 
Arts, to the linguistic, to the philosophical, 
and to the mathematical courses ; the next 
four to the study of divinity. Church history. 
Biblical criticism, and Hebrew; the last two 
years to medicine and to science. His Uni- 
versity gave him his degree of Doctor of 
Divinity in 1872. 

John Stuart Blackie, still well remembered 
on the streets of Edinburgh, went to the 
University after a short period of study at 
Marischal College, in Aberdeen. He neg- 
lected his mathematics, however, and he 



Edinburgh 67 

failed to obtain his degree; so in 1829, he 
migrated to Germany, to finish his course. 

In 1852, he became Professor of Greek in 
Edinburgh, a chair he occupied for some 
thirty years. His aim, as a lecturer, was to 
direct the attention of his classes towards 
the consideration of Greek life and Greek 
thought, rather than to produce exact 
scholarship. He was the author of, and a 
vigorous leader in, that agitation for the 
broadening and elevation of university edu- 
cation in Scotland which resulted in the 
passing of what is known as the Universities 
Act. 

Another one of the few immortal names 
upon which we come, somehow to our sur- 
prise, in the famous roll of Edinburgh men 
is that of Charles Darwin. In his short 
Autobiography, presented by his son, he 
gives the following account of his college 
career : 

" As I was doing no good at school," he 
wrote, *' my father took me away at a rather 
earlier age than usual, and sent me [Oct., 1825] 



68 Scottish Universities 

to Edinburgh University with my brother, where 
I stayed for two years or sessions. . . . The 
instruction at Edinburgh," he added, "was al- 
together by lectures, and these were intolerably 
dull, with the exception of those on chemistry 
by Hope. But, to my mind, there are no ad- 
vantages, and many disadvantages, in lectures, 
compared with reading. Dr. Duncan's lectures 
on materia medica, at eight o'clock on a winter's 
morning, are something fearful to remember. 

Dr. made his lectures on human anatomy 

as dull as he was himself, and the subject dis- 
gusted me. Later, ' ' he said, * ' during my second 

year at Edinburgh, I attended Dr. 's lectures 

on geology and zoology, but they were incredibly 
dull. The sole effect they produced upon me 
was the determination never, as long as I live, 
to read a book on geology, or in any way to 
study the science." 

These Dr. Blanks and Dr. Dashes of his 
(he or Mr. Francis Darwin carefully omitted 
the mention of names in full) would have 
been interested, perhaps, to know the im- 
pression they made upon the young Darwin 
by the manner, and the matter, of their dis- 
courses. And one cannot help wondering 
how less gifted youths at Edinburgh, during 



*^!H^ I 




JOHN BROWN. 



Edinburgh 69 

the first quarter of the nineteenth century, 
were moved, and inspired, by what they 
heard in the class-rooms of the University. 

Darwin's father perceiving that the son 
had but little liking for the profession of 
medicine sent him, in 1828, to Cambridge 
to prepare himself for the Church. The 
world well knows the result. 

When the young John Brown, the friend 
of "Rab" and of Rab's Friends, entered the 
Arts classes of the University, in 1826, at 
the age of sixteen, no doubt a dog of some 
Scottish breed went with him, as far as the 
gates, and waited for him until he came out. 
And with that dog, and some other dogs, 
no doubt, he spent all his "Spare Hours " 
during his college course. 

In 1828, he began the study of medicine. 
And he was graduated in 1833. 

A direct descendant of Robert Aytoun, 
the Scottish poet who was a St. Andrews 
man in the sixteenth century, was William 
Edmonstoune Aytoun, author of the Lays 
of the Cavaliers, who was a student, and a 



JO Scottish Universities 

professor, at Edinburgh. The younger 
Aytoun was, even in his college days, ex- 
ceedingly fluent in the writing of verse ; his 
mother, who was an intimate friend of Sir 
Walter Scott, having imbued him with a 
passion for ballad-poetry when he was yet a 
boy. His first volume was published when 
he was seventeen. 

In 1845, he was appointed to the Chair of 
Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres in the Uni- 
versity, where he was in his own particular 
element, and where he was immensely popu- 
lar, raising the number of students in that 
branch of study from thirty to nearly nine- 
teen hundred, in the course of some eighteen 
years. He edited Blackivood ; and he mar- 
ried the daughter of John Wilson^ — ' * Christo- 
pher North." 

The audience which listened to Dr. 
Chalmers, during his Professorship of Di- 
vinity, was altogether unique within the 
walls of a university; embracing as it did 
not only his own regular students, but dis- 
tinguished members of the various profes- 



Edinburgh 71 

sions, and many of the most intelligent 
citizens of Edinburgh. He stood upon 
familiar ground, that of natural theology 
and the evidences of Christianity; the im- 
pression he made upon his hearers was 
great ; and great was his influence for good. 

He had studied mathematics, chemistry, 
and natural philosophy in Edinburgh, after 
he was graduated from St. Andrews. 

The most distinguished of the pupils of 
Dr. Chalmers, and the man who, perhaps, 
most profited by his teachings was Norman 
Macleod. He studied divinity in Edinburgh, 
after he left Glasgow where he was distin- 
guished only for his progress in logic. And 
he always held Dr. Chalmers in the 'greatest 
gratitude and affection. The * ' Good Words* ' 
of the Master, passed down to posterity 
through the student, became household 
words in Scotland. 

Robert Louis Stevenson was delicate as a 
child, and consequently backward in the 
forming of letters. He could not read until 
he was eight; but when he was six he 



72 Scottish Universities 

dictated, to his mother, a History of Moses 
which he illustrated with his own hand. 
This is his earliest piece of literary work, 
and it is said to be still extant. 

At school, however, he was bright and 
alert, although desultory in his studies. He 
entered the University of Edinburgh in No- 
vember, 1867, when he was seventeen, and 
he attended his classes as regularly as his 
disposition, and indisposition, would permit. 
According to his own statement he was in- 
corrigibly idle at college, and one particular 
professor, at the end of a session, declared 
to him that he had no recollection of ever 
having seen his [Stevenson's] face before; 
which Stevenson promptly confessed was 
not unlikely. 

His activity of mind was exhibited chiefly 
outside the College precincts. In the streets 
and wynds of the famous town, he studied 
men, of all sorts and conditions; and in his 
own room, in his father's house, he read 
eagerly and omnivorously, poetry, fiction, 
essays, old and new; devoting himself, with 



Edinburgh 72> 

all the mental enthusiasm of which he was 
possessed, to the study of Scottish history. 

In 1 871, he gave up the idea of following 
in the paternal footsteps, as a civil engineer; 
and he attended the law classes at the Uni- 
versity for several, irregular sessions. He 
was called to the bar in 1875, but he never 
practised. 

During all this period of school and col- 
lege life, he was trying his 'prentice hand 
upon literary composition, in prose and in 
verse, publishing a few, now rare, pamphlets, 
highly prized by the collectors of "Steven- 
soniana," but keeping the greater, if not the 
better, part of his work to himself. 

In 1873, he wrote to one of his intimates : — 

" I am glad to hear what you say about the 
exam. Until quite lately I had treated that 
pretty cavalierly; for I can say, honestly, that I 
do not mind being plucked. I shall just have to 
go up again. ... I don't, of course, want 
to be plucked. But so far as my style of know- 
ledge suits them, I cannot make much betterment 
on it, in a month. If they wish scholarship 
more exact, I must take anew lease altogether." 



•^ 



H 




CHARLES DARWIN. 



Glasgow 



IN the month of June, and in the year of 
our Lord one thousand nine hundred 
and one, while these words were being 
written, in Glasgow, the University of Glas- 
gow was celebrating its four hundred and 
fiftieth birthday; what it called its "Ninth 
Jubilee." Why* 'ninth" and why "jubilee" 
are not very clear. There is no record of 
its having celebrated its "first," or its 
"second, jubilee," or any other numerical 
"jubilee " whatever. And even the Earl of 
Rosebery, the Lord Rector of the Institu- 
tion at that time, was not very sure concern- 
ing the meaning of "jubilee," according to 
his own published confession. He acknow- 
ledged, in a volume called The Year of the 
Jubilee, that "the wholly inadequate figure" 
(the words are his own) — "that the wholly 
77 



78 Scottish Universities 

inadequate figure of twenty-five had been 
adopted as constituting a jubilee," and then 
he proceeded to preside at a "jubilee " con- 
stituted of what would seem to be the 
equally inadequate figure of fifty; without 
giving any reason for the application of the 
term to a period of either a quarter or a 
half of a century ; his only expressed excuse 
for the latter being the historical fact that 
two of his own sovereigns had celebrated 
what were termed "jubilees," at the con- 
clusion of fifty years of their own respective 
reigns. 

Dr. Samuel Johnson defined "jubilee " as 
"a publick festivity; a period of rejoicing; a 
season of joy," without regard to the passing 
of time ; and he cited Milton as his authority. 
And Shakspere used not the word at all. 
But in The Third Book of Moses, called 
Leviticus, we read how the Lord spake unto 
Moses on Mount Sinai, saying: — "A jubilee 
shall that fiftieth year be to you ;" the words 
being thus rendered into English in the reign 
of James First of England and Sixth of Scot- 



Glasgow 79 

land. A couple of centuries eariier, one 
Geoffrey Chaucer, in The Sii^nmoner s Tale^ 
told how two friends of fifty years' standing 
"made their Jubilee" ; and so there is some 
little excuse for the word "jubilee" in this 
connection. But, still, in the absence of all 
previous "jubilees," why "ninth"? 

At all events, in 145 1, Pope Nicholas 
Fifth, the founder of the Vatican Library, 
established a university in Glasgow which 
was modelled upon the University of Bo- 
logna; and, in 1901, that Scottish University 
had a "jubilee" ; whereat there was a most 
liberal feast of reason ; and whereat soul 
flowed like water, in prose and in verse, in 
languages dead, and in languages quick. 

Glasgow was a small place when the Pope 
of Rome set up his school there, in the 
middle of the fifteenth century, and it was 
of but little importance in the eyes of Scot- 
land, and in the eyes of the then known 
world. Principal Story, in this same "Jubi- 
lee Book," quotes John Mair as saying, at 
the beginning of the sixteenth century, that 



8o Scottish Universities 

Glasgow was "the seat of an archbishop and 
of a university, poorly endowed, and not 
rich in scholars" : although he quotes Bishop 
Leslie, a little more than a half century later, 
as declaring Glasgow to have been "a noble 
town, the most renowned market in all the 
West ; honourable and celebrated ; where, 
before the Heresy there was an Academy not 
obscure nor infrequent, nor of a small num- 
ber, in respect both of Philosophy, and 
Grammar, and Politick Study." 

The earliest sessions of the Institution 
were held in an old building in Rotten Row, 
long since wiped out of existence, with the 
fishermen's huts and poor hovels which, 
with the Cathedral, made up all that there 
was of Glasgow in those days. The original 
College possessed a beautiful charter, but 
not much of anything else. The Pope was 
good enough to create it, but he forgot, or 
neglected, to provide for its support. It 
had no wealthy alumni to furnish it with 
dormitories and gymnasiums, until Lord 
Hamilton, who may have been a graduate, 



Glasgow ^^ 

left it several acres of land and a tenement, 
on what was afterwards to become the High 

Street. 

As an expression of their gratitude for 
this gift, students and Faculty prayed, twice 
a day, and out loud, for the repose of the 
souls of the donor, and the Lady Euphemia 
his spouse, both deceased. And they kept 
up the practice, no doubt, until the outbreak 
of the Reformation; when the Reformers 
turned all their serious attention to the sav- 
ing of the souls of the living! 

These old College buildings stood on the 
site of what is now called the College Station 
of the North British Railway, on the High 
Street. And the Goods Station, or what 
the Americans would style the "Freight 
Depot" of the Glasgow and South -Western 
Railway occupies the site of the College 
Church, and Churchyard. 

But, nothing of College, of College Church, 
or of College Churchyard now remains, ex- 
cept the gate of the old building carried to, 
and rebuilt in, the new. 



82 Scottish Universities 

The present University structures, on 
Gilmore Hill, a long walk distant from the 
old, were occupied, for the first time, during 
the session of 1870-71. They are described 
as being **of the early English pointed style, 
with an infusion of the Scoto-French mo- 
nastic and secular styles of a later period." 
This may be lucid enough to architects, and 
to students of architecture, but it is not apt 
to mean much to ordinary secular minds of 
the present period. 

During the seventeenth century, whether 
under Pope or under Presbytery, as strict a 
watch as was possible was kept over the stu- 
dents, for their moral good. Certain cham- 
bers within the College were allotted to as 
many undergraduates as the rooms could 
hold. In each apartment was accommoda- 
tion for four youths, every lad with a desk, 
two to a bed, with a table in common. For 
all this the occupant was charged, from half 
a crown to eight shillings, according to ad- 
vantage, or disadvantage, of situation. A 
censor visited the rooms every night, at nine 



Glasgow ^3 

of the clock, to see that all was right; that 
there were no cards or dice, or frivolous and 
profane literature, in use; and to inquire if 
the occupants had been "careful in secret 
prayer." And then the tallow candle was 
blown out, and the day, with its work, was 
over. Every morning, the same censor, at 
f\ve of the clock, awakened the youths, and 
saw that all were soberly behaving. At six 
of the clock were praise and prayer, and 
reading of the Scripture, in the common- 
room, of course long before the rising of the 
sun in the long, long winter months of Scot- 
land. After "chapel," the undergraduates 
on empty stomachs listened to lectures, 
always in Latin. At nine, they breakfasted 
in hall, on a soup of oat-loaf "good and 
sufficient," three portions to the pound, 
with bread and drink (no doubt, this last was 
not of water). On three mornings of the 
week, they had, in addition, an egg apiece. 
They dined at noon. On "flesh-days," Sun- 
days, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, 
they were regaled with a fragment of oaten 



84 Scottish Universities 

loaf, and with as much of a lump of beef, 
contained in a general wooden platter, as 
they could cut, and capture, with their own 
clasp knives. On fish-days, their dinners 
consisted of two eggs and a herring. The 
universal supper, on all days, was bread and 
milk. There is no record of any of them 
being overfed, to any serious extent. 

The students in those times were per- 
mitted to leave the College precincts when 
the classes were over; but on no condition 
were they to appear in the streets with 
dagger or with sword. To the Town, and 
in the town, they were allowed to express 
themselves in the local vernacular. But in- 
side the gates, even at play, they were se- 
verely fined if they spoke anything but 
Latin. They were not permitted to have 
servants, or to introduce friends or relatives, 
who did not understand the scholastic Latin. 
And one of the earliest regulations of the 
College forbade the students swimming; 
although exactly why this last rule was en- 
forced is not explained. 



Glasgow 85 

Latin, it may be added, is a language as 
defunct generally within the precincts of the 
University of Glasgow now, as it is any- 
where else. It is only resurrected as a mat- 
ter of business ; and it is still embalmed in 
examination papers, in set orations, and in 
diplomas. 

Alexander Carlyle, styled ** Jupiter" Car- 
lyle, by his friends and admirers, who were 
many, occupied one of these College cham- 
bers in 1743-4; and he has given some 
account of his surroundings. 

A College servant made his bed, and 
looked after his fire. He seems to have 
hired his own furniture; and he mentions 
a maid as appearing once a fortnight with 
clean linen. His dinner, consisting of roast- 
beef, potatoes, and small-beer, cost him four- 
pence. 

As the number of students increased, and 
as the demand for additional class-rooms 
became greater, the letting of chambers to 
students was gradually discontinued ; never 
to be revived. 



86 Scottish Universities 

The undergraduates seem, at one time, to 
have been fond not only of play-houses, but 
of playing themselves; and in 1721, it was 
declared that, in future, no student should 
appear in public, on the stage, without pre- 
vious sanction of the Faculty, and on pain of 
expulsion. Such performances were looked 
upon as tending to divert the youths from 
more serious and more useful studies, and 
to lead them into ways of spending their 
time, and their money, which were neither 
profitable to themselves nor conducive to 
their good order. 

The classes in the beginning were opened 
with prayer, by the students each in turn, 
not by the Faculty ; and always in Latin. 
But in later years, when poor prayers and 
bad Latin made the service ridiculous, only 
those were asked who had the gift, as well 
as the wish, to invoke the blessing. 

Mr. James Coutts, in his Short Account of 
the University of Glasgow, says that some of 
the early disturbances, among the students, 
as compared with modern breaches of disci- 



Glasgow 87 

pline make the latter seem **tame and do- 
mestic," — the words in quotation marks 
being his own. He cites, as an example, one 
instance in which two youths, of high social 
degree, did wait for one of their professors, 
and did prepare to attack him, on his way 
from the College through the Churchyard. 
They were armed with batons and swords ; 
and the professor fled. But Mr. Cunning- 
ham, the chief offender, was captured ; and, 
as a punishment, and as a warning, he was 
ordered to appear, bare-footed and bare- 
headed, at the scene of the assault, and 
there to crave pardon for his offence. He 
disregarded the order; his family took the 
matter up, as a family affair ; and, after much 
discussion, which threatened to become 
very serious, the delinquent, bare-headed 
and without his shoes, but otherwise mag- 
nificently attired, did finally present himself, 
surrounded by four or five hundred of his 
family and friends, and did, then and there, 
acknowledge that he had been a little hasty ! 
Early in the eighteenth century, there 



SS Scottish Universities 

was a very grand row between Town and 
Gown. Town resented some playful dis- 
turbances of Gown, and locked up a few of 
the playful disturbers. Whereupon other 
Gownsmen forcibly seized the keys of the 
prison, and assaulted, violently, the prison- 
keeper. Certain Townsmen retaliated by 
shooting and otherwise puncturing the 
students, with equal violence, and within 
the sacred precincts of the College itself. 
This last was a high violation of University 
privileges, never before known to be equalled, 
within the memory of man. Town author- 
ities and Gown authorities became deeply 
interested ; and many meetings between Col- 
lege Masters and Civic Magistrates were held 
before a settlement was reached. The ring- 
leading students were expelled, and other- 
wise punished by the Masters. And the 
Magistrates issued a proclamation forbid- 
ding the citizens to enter the University 
gates with warlike intent, either armed or 
unarmed. Town in this instance seems to 
have prevailed over Gown. 




JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART. 



Glasgow 89 

Mr. Andrew Lang in his Life of John 
Gibson Lockharty says that 

"the College [Glasgow] in Lockhart's time 
[1805 to 1808] as in my own, was the black old 
quadrangle, guarded by an effigy of some 
heraldic animal, probably the Scottish lion, into 
whose open mouth it was thought unbecoming 
to insert a bun. Blackness, dirt, smoke, a selec- 
tion of the countless smells of Glasgow; small, 
airless, crowded rooms, thronged by youths at 
whom Lockhart could not have scoffed for ex- 
aggerated elegance in dress; these things made 
up a picture of the old College of Glasgow. 
Now" [1896], he adds, "there is a new and 
magnificent building, in a part of the town which 
enjoys, for Glasgow, a respectable atmosphere." 

It will be perceived from this, that there 
are men still living, and still mentally and 
physically active, who remember the Uni- 
versity in all its smoke and blackness, and 
who do not regret the small airless rooms 
and the many airy smells of the old order 
of things. 

There are, on the other hand, certain 
romantic persons, seeing and scenting from 



90 Scottish Universities 

the outside only, who wish that some of the 
smoke from the earlier, more interesting, 
chimneys might have been left to curl grace- 
fully over the High Street, and over the 
sites of the railway termini ; and that there 
might still be a little of the ancient College 
blackness visible in the atmosphere now 
kept respectable by commerce "in the seat 
of the most renowned market of the west of 
Scotland." 

The student life of the present, in the 
University of Glasgow, is very similar to 
that of Edinburgh, elsewhere more minutely 
described. Like Edinburgh, and the other 
Scottish universities, Glasgow is what is 
called "a non-residential college." The 
undergraduates (outside the buildings) are 
their own masters, absolutely. They wear 
cap and gown ; the traditional cap, and a 
scarlet gown ; but these are not always 
compulsory, even in class-rooms or halls; 
and neither cap, nor gown, on ordinary 
occasions, is often seen in the streets of the 
town. 




INTERIOR COURT, OLD COLLEGE, QLASQO\A/. 



Glasgow 91 

There are two annual sessions. The first 
from about the 15th of October until about 
the 20th of April. The second from the 
end of April until about the end of June. 
The same proportion of students as in 
Edinburgh seek, and obtain, their degrees. 

Those who do elect to go out into the 
world as Bachelors, or as Masters, of Arts, 
are literally capped and hooded. The hood 
is personal, bought, or borrowed, for the 
occasion. The cap is general ; and -it has 
lasted for generations of graduates. It is 
clapped upon the head of each applicant, in 
turn, as he, and not infrequently as she, 
kneels reverently in front of the Chancellor's 
chair in Bute Hall. 

In 171 5, a printing-press was established 
within the University precincts, and it 
issued, although for a short time only, a 
penny newspaper, published three times a 
week. 

To-day there is but one College periodical, 
the Glasgow Ufiiversity Journal^ and that is 
very young in years. 



92 Scottish Universities 

There is now, during term-times, a Sun- 
day afternoon service in Bute Hall; some 
distinguished stranger usually preaching, 
from a three-decked pulpit, on wheels, 
which is rolled into the room for the occa- 
sion. A particularly selected undergraduate 
reads the lesson ; and the Principal, or 
President, generally makes the prayer. The 
service is open to any person who cares to 
attend, be he citizen or student ; but there 
is no compulsion exercised towards either 
Gown or Town. 

As in Edinburgh there is a Students* 
Union, but it is as young in years as is the 
University Journal; there is a Students* 
Representative Council; and there are 
students' societies of all ages, and of all 
varieties. But the student himself, as in 
Edinburgh, goes and comes at his own 
sweet, untrammelled will. He makes but 
few friends; he carries away with him a 
good deal of useful and of ornamental 
knowledge. But he has no class spirit to 
carry away with him, or to leave behind him. 



Glasgow 93 

The average list of students is about two 
thousand. There are a large number of 
professorial chairs, and of lectureships 
among the Faculties of Arts, Science, Law, 
Medicine, and Theology. 

Each professor has his own class-room. 
There are ample provisions for laboratories, 
and the like, for the development of the 
mind ; and there is a gymnasium and a re- 
creation ground, for the cultivation of the 
muscles. 

The Library and the Hunterian Museum 
occupy a good portion of the New Building; 
and are richly endowed ; filling admirably all 
the requirements of such, and similar, in- 
stitutions. 

The modern Bute Hall, named after a 
munificent donor, a late Marquis of Bute, is 
the scene of all graduation ceremonies and 
other functions. It cost a very handsome 
sum ; and is in every way worthy of the 
cause for which it was intended, and to 
which it is put. 

The most ancient of the relics of the 



94 Scottish Universities 

University, with the exception of some of 
the manuscripts in the Library, and unques- 
tionably the most revered and prized, is the 
mace. It dates back to the days of David 
Cadyow, the earliest Rector, who, on the 
occasion of his re-election to ofifice, in 1460, 
donated twenty nobles for its manufacture 
and purchase. This sum, however, was not 
sufficient; and a few years later, the mem- 
bers of the institution subscribed, according 
to their means, for its proper completion. 
It is a venerable piece of furniture, always 
playing an important part in University 
functions, and always handled with rever- 
ence and with affection. The shaft is of 
silver; but other precious metals have been 
employed in its construction. Upon its 
various parts are engraved Latin inscrip- 
tions, the rampant lion of Scotland, and the 
arms of certain noble Scottish families. 

The Faculty of Glasgow describing this 
symbol once, with much pride, to a trans- 
atlantic visitor, were greatly impressed upon 
hearing that the only mace known to the 



Glasgow 95 

American colleges was a base-ball bat or a 
tennis-racket ! 

The architect of the New Building was 
Sir Gilbert Scott. The name of the archi- 
tect of the Old Building is now forgotten; 
but the records show how many joiners, and 
slaters, and sawyers, and quarriers, and 
carters, and wrights, and masons, and bar- 
rowmen were employed. And there is evi- 
dence that, at the expense of the University, 
these workmen were treated to drink now 
and then ; and that, sometimes, the regents, 
who were the professors, partook of glasses 
of wine in their society, and also at the 
University's expense. 

The archway and an adjoining portion of 
the Old College were preserved as has been 
shown. And by private subscription, they 
have been put together again, at the north- 
eastern gateway of the present edifice, form- 
ing not the least interesting portions of the 
establishment as it now stands. 

In 1892, Glasgow, with the rest of the 
Scottish universities, under what is called 



96 Scottish Universities 

"the Universities Act of 1889," first per- 
mitted women to study for degrees, but 
in separate classes. And Queen Margaret 
College, established in 1883, ^^r the higher 
education of women, with its staff of teach- 
ers, and students, was made a part, and 
portion, of the University proper. It is 
slowly, but surely, growing in numbers. 
But it is hardly old enough yet, important 
as it is, and the largest in Scotland, to have 
literary landmarks of its own. Its buildings 
and grounds are of considerable extent ; and 
it forms, and justly so, an important part of 
the University of Glasgow to-day. 

One of the most devoted of the earlier 
sons of Glasgow University, which he en- 
tered in 1601, was Zachary Boyd, notwith- 
standing the fact that for some unknown 
reason, he left Glasgow in 1603 to matricu- 
late at St. Andrews, where he took his de- 
gree of M.A., four years later. In his 
maturity, he was, successively, Dean of the 
Faculty, Rector, and Vice-Chancellor of the 
University of Glasgow ; and he bequeathed 




OLD COLLEGE GATEWAY, GLASGOW. 



Glasgow 97 

to it a very voluminous collection of his man- 
uscripts, some of which have been printed, 
from time to time, as curiosities of literature. 
In TJie Last Bat tell of the Soule in Deaths he 
thus apostrophises water in general : 

" O, Cursed Waters; O, Waters of Marah, 
full bitter are yee to me; O, Element which of 
all others shall be most detestable to m)^ Soule. 
I shall never wash mine hands with thee but I 
shall remember what thou hast done to my best 
beloved Sonne, the darling of my Soule. I shall 
forever be a friend to the fire, which is thy great- 
est foe. Away Rivers; Away Seas; 
O Seas of Sorrows; O FearfuU Floodes; O, 
Trembling Tempest; O, Wilful Waves; O, 
Swelhng Surges; O, Wicked Waters; O, Dole- 
ful Deepes; O, Feartest Pooles; O, Botchful 
Butcher Boates;" etc. 

And he winds up by expressing his sincere 
regret that he cannot refrain from tears, 
because tears are salt and wet, as certain 
waters are. All this was simply because an 
unfortunate grandson of James Fourth was 
drowned, once, while crossing the water to 
Amsterdam from Leith. 



9^ Scottish Universities 

Some of Boyd's expressions in verse are 
equally remarkable. In TJie Flowers of 
Zion, a collection of "Poems on Selected 
Subjects in Scripture History, rendered in 
Dramatic Form," he gives one soliloquy of 
Jonah, during the prophet's traditional voy- 
age in the cabin of the whale, which solilo- 
quy is certainly unique. There is space 
for but little more than fragments of it 
here: 

" What house is this [he cries], where 's neither 
coal nor candle? 
Where I nothing but guts of fishes handle? 
I and my table are both here within 
Where day ne'er dawned, where sunne did 
never shine, 
' ' The like of this on earth man never saw. 
A living man within a monster's maw 



He [Noah] in his Ark might goe, and also 

come; 
But I sit still in such a straightened roome 
As is most uncouth, head and feet together. 
Among such grease as would a thousand 

smother." 



Glasgow 99 

Robert Woodrow, the laborious author of 
The History of the Sufferings of the Church 
of Scotland, like Dugald Stewart, was em- 
phatically a university man. The son of the 
Professor of Divinity in Glasgow College, 
he was born within the College precincts, 
was a graduate of the institution; and for 
some years he was its librarian. His great 
and serious work is now one of the half- 
forgotten books of the world ; but his name 
and his blood are perpetuated on the west- 
ern side of the Atlantic, especially in the 
University in the State of New Jersey. 

There was a good deal of fun, and not a 
little of frolic, mixed with the serious studies 
of Tobias Smollett at Glasgow. He was 
found of practical joking, and he was famous 
for the satirical and pungent nature of his 
comments upon persons and things. One 
of his biographers gives a striking example 
of the force of his repartee. He partici- 
pated in a certain mild Town and Gown 
row, when and where the missiles were 
snowballs. Among his civic opponents was 

LcfC. 



loo Scottish Universities 

a surgeon's apprentice, who, upon being re- 
buked by his master, an eye-witness of the 
encounter, explained that he (the appren- 
tice) did not begin it; that he was first 
assaulted without cause ; and that he, natur- 
ally, had to defend himself. The surgeon 
seemed to consider the statement improb- 
able, remarking that nobody ever threw 
snowballs at him ! Upon this hint did 
Smollett immediately and emphatically 
speak, hitting the surgeon in the ear with 
an unusually large and hard snowball, fired 
with unusual accuracy of aim. Smollett's 
biographer in question regarded this as a 
wonderful example of his subject's power in 
the use of the retort courteous, the quip 
modest, the reply churlish, the reproof 
valiant, and the counter-check quarrelsome. 
By the chance of his intimacy with some 
of the medical students in the College, 
Smollett was led to turn his attention to 
what was called the "Profession of Physic 
and Anatomy." But, for all that, he did 
not neglect the study of literature; and. 




JAMES WATT. 



Glasgow loi 

during his undergraduate days, he wrote a 
tragedy upon the death of James First of 
Scotland which composition he termed TJie 
Regicide. It was better suited to the closet 
than to the stage ; but it is said to display 
considerable ability. It was not published 
until 1749, some ten years later. He left 
college when he was eighteen, one of his 
professors speaking of him, affectionately, 
as "a bubbly-nosed callant; with always a 
stone in his pouch." 

One of the great distinctions of Glasgow 
University is the fact that TJie Wealth of 
Nations was first distributed, and first drew 
interest, in her class-rooms, by the medium 
of the lectures of Adam Smith, as they were 
delivered to her students; to be banked, and 
safely invested, afterwards, through many 
editions of bound volumes. 

Smith entered the College in 1737, when 
he was hardly fifteen, and we are told that 
his favourite pursuits there were natural and 
moral philosophy and mathematics. In 
1740, he went to Balliol College at Oxford. 



I02 Scottish Universities 

In 1748, he lectured on belles-lettres and 
rhetoric at Edinburgh. In 175 1, he went 
back to Glasgow to accept the Chair of 
Logic ; and the next year he was made Pro- 
fessor of Moral Philosophy, a position he 
held until 1763. And in 1787, he was 
elected Rector of the University which he 
had attended so faithfully and so long. No 
preferment, he declared in his letter of ac- 
ceptance, could have given him so much 
real satisfaction. No man, he added, could 
owe greater obligations to a society than he 
did to Glasgow. The period of thirteen 
years which he had spent as a member of 
that institution, he remembered as by far the 
most useful and, therefore as by far the hap- 
piest and most honourable, period of his life. 
We are told that, in delivering his lectures, 
Smith trusted almost entirely to extem- 
porary elocution. His manner, although 
not graceful, was plain and unaffected ; and 
he seemed to be always interested in his 
subject, while he never failed to interest his 
hearers. 



Glasgow 103 

Not the least valuable of Adam Smith's 
contributions to The Wealth of Nations was 
his kindness to James Watt, who was not 
permitted to follow his profession of instru- 
ment maker in Glasgow, on the ground that 
he had not served a proper legal apprentice- 
ship to the trade, that he did not, as it were, 
belong to the Union. But the heads of the 
College, including Smith, appointed him 
"Mathematical Instrument Maker to the 
University," and authorised him to establish 
a workshop within its precincts, where he 
remained for some time. 

James Boswell, the famous biographer of 
Johnson, after his graduation at Edinburgh, 
studied civil law, in Glasgow, in 1759; and 
he also attended there the lectures of Adam 
Smith on rhetoric and moral philosophy, 
although he is always considered, and no 
doubt he always considered himself, an 
Edinburgh man. 

Although Dugald Stewart was born, was 
educated, and taught in the College at Edin- 
burgh, and was intimately associated with 



I04 Scottish Universities 

that institution for fifty-seven years, he 
went to Glasgow at the commencement of 
the session of 1771, to benefit by the lectures 
of Dr. John Reed, the metaphysician and 
moral philosopher, where he not only at- 
tended diligently to the matter in hand, but 
composed, during his leisure hours, his 
famous Essay on Dreaming, afterwards pub- 
lished in the first volume of TJic Philosophy 
of the Human Mind. He was then eighteen 
years of age. 

Francis Jeffrey was at Glasgow for two 
sessions, entering at the traditional early 
age. During the first half-year, his classes 
were the Greek and the logic; during his 
second term, he devoted himself particularly 
to moral philosophy. One of his contem- 
poraries says that "he exhibited nothing 
remarkable, except a degree of quickness, 
bordering, as some thought, on petulance; 
and the whim of cherishing a premature 
moustache, very black and covering the 
whole of his upper lip, for which he was 
inordinately laughed at, and teased, by his 




FRANCIS JEFFREY. 



Glasgow 105 

fellow-students." Another man recollected 
seeing, at a certain election for the Lord 
Rectorship, "a little black creature," who 
was haranguing some boys on the Green, 
and urging them to vote against Adam 
Smith. This was Jeffrey. Still another 
Glasgow man remembered Jeffrey at a de- 
bating society called "The Historical and 
Critical," where he distinguished himself as 
the most acute and fluent of the speakers. 
His favourite subjects were criticism and 
metaphysics. 

He was, or at least he thought he was, at 
that time, a victim to superstitious fears. 
And, to cure himself, he was accustomed to 
walk, alone, and at midnight, around the 
Cathedral and its graveyard; then a very 
solitary spot. He was elected Lord Rector 
of the University in 1820. 

Glasgow is so universally looked upon, 
and apostrophised, as the Centre of Trade 
and of Commerce, as the very epitome of 
all that is practical, in a business way, that 
it is hard to think of The Pleasures of Hope 



io6 Scottish Universities 

and The Pleasures of Memory as springing 
from its College. Nevertheless the former 
poem was begun while Thomas Campbell 
was an undergraduate, and before he was 
twenty. He had posed as a poet ten years 
earlier than that, and those of his produc- 
tions, as a child, which have been preserved, 
are said to "exhibit all that delicate appre- 
ciation of the graceful flow and music of 
language for which his poetry was afterwards 
distinguished." 

Born in Glasgow, he entered the Univer- 
sity there in 1791, when he was fourteen; 
and he at once attracted the attention of 
the masters, by the happiness of his transla- 
tions of Euripides, put by him, as class 
exercises, into excellent verse. In 1793, his 
Poem 071 Description won the prize in the 
logic class, although it had been written 
four years previously, and before he had 
reached the age of twelve. 

Those of us who are interested at present 
in the formation of the common mind in 
universities, on each side of the Atlantic, 



Glasgow 107 

rarely meet with examination-papers which 
are rendered into verse that is not exceed- 
ingly blank. And when the modern under- 
graduate lisps in logic numbers, and receives 
the highest commendation for so doing, the 
modern professor will think that the millen- 
nium has come! 

Whether Campbell's prize was awarded 
on the strength of his knowledge of logic, 
or because of the delicate music of the lan- 
guage in which his knowledge of logic was 
expressed, the University records do not 
show. 

During the greater part of his college 
course he was obliged to pay for his own 
education by giving lessons in Latin and in 
Greek, as a private tutor. He had com- 
pleted five sessions at the University before 
he was twenty, when he went to Edinburgh 
to find a publisher for The Pleasures of Hope. 

In 1826, he was elected Lord Rector of 
the University, by the unanimous vote of the 
students. The honour was conferred upon 
him for three successive terms, a compliment 



io8 Scottish Universities 

rarely paid to any holder of that high 
academic office. 

In his student days, Campbell lodged on 
the High Street, on the corner of College 
Street, and opposite the Old College. But 
the tenement, alas, for the pleasure of the 
memory of it, no longer stands. 

John Wilson, better known as "Christo- 
pher North," was at Glasgow University 
for a few years, where he studied Greek 
and Latin ; but he is chiefly associated with 
Magdalen College in Oxford, where his 
education was completed, and with the Uni- 
versity of Edinburgh, where, in 1820, he was 
appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy. 

Lockhart, the son-in-law and biographer 
of Scott, was matriculated at Glasgow Uni- 
versity in 1805, when he was in his twelfth 
year, and among the youngest of his class. 
Mr. Andrew Lang, Lockhart's biographer, 
gives the official record of his subject's 
career in the institution. In 1805-6, he 
attended the Humanity class, gaining, dur- 
ing the next session, the fifth prize, "for 



Glasgow 109 

exemplary diligence and regularity"; and 
also the second prize **for excellence at the 
examination in Roman antiquities." In 
1807-8, he received a prize in the Greek 
class "for propriety of conduct, diligence, 
and earnest ability, displayed during the 
whole of the session." In 1808-9, ^^ ^^- 
ceived a prize in the logic class, and two 
prizes in Latin. 

A friend of Lockhart has told of the char- 
acter and appearance of the boy on his first 
entering college. He had but lately lost a 
brother and a sister, who had died within a 
few days of each other, and to whom he was 
devotedly attached. He had then barely 
recovered from the misery caused by his 
great grief, which he had tried to suppress. 
He was thin, and pale, untidy, a mocker at 
what he considered dandyism in others, 
fond of poetry, averse to games, addicted 
to satire, and given to pictorial caricature 
of his professors. He was not fond of 
fights with the Town boys. His chief 
amusement was to collect, and to recite. 



no Scottish Universities 

ballads. He obtained a Balliol Fellowship 
in i8c9, when he left Glasgow to complete 
his university course in Oxford. 

When Walter Scott lay a-dying at Abbots- 
ford, he turned to Lockhart, and said — the 
account is Lockhart 's own: — "Lockhart, I 
have but a few moments to speak to you. 
My dear, be a good man — be virtuous — be 
religious — Be a good man ! " 

Lockhart was a good man. And his col- 
lege records show that he was a good boy — 
the stuff out of which good men are made. 

After Robert PoUok had passed through 
a regular course of literary and philosophical 
study at Glasgow, he entered the Divinity 
School, and was licensed to preach in the 
spring of 1827. He delivered but one, 
single, sermon ; and he died in the autumn 
of the same year. 

He made several attempts at prose, and at 
verse, during his early college days ; and he 
wrote his Course of Time^ — a very unusual 
undergraduate production, — while prepar- 
ing for the ministry. It was published, by ■ 




WALTER SCOTT. 



Glasgow 1 1 1 

Blackwood, just before the author's death, 
on the strong recommendation of Prof. 
Wilson, ' ' Christopher North. ' ' In one por- 
tion of what the inscription upon his monu- 
ment calls his "Immortal Poem," which is, 
in a measure, a fragment of autobiography, 
he tells how 

" He called philosophy, and with his heart 
Reasoned. He called religion, too, but called 
Reluctantly, and therefore was not heard." 

How 

'• He stood admiring, 
But stood, admired, not long. The harp he 

seized. 
The harp he loved, loved better than his life, 
The harp which uttered deepest notes, and held 
The ear of thought a captive to its song. 
He searched and meditated much, and whiles, 
With rapturous hand in secret, touched the lyre 
Aiming at glorious strains." 

A tinge of melancholy pervades the song. 
But he believed that he was to 

"Have 
His name recorded in the Book of Life." 

And in its pages his name still stands. 



112 Scottish Universities 

In the long list of Scottish literary worthies 
are two Michael Scotts. The earlier, born 
in the beginning of the thirteenth century, 
before there were any Scottish universities 
to go to, was educated, it is supposed, in 
Oxford ; the second, the author of two once 
famous books, Tom Cringle' s Log and The 
Cruise of the Midge, was born in Glasgow 
in 1789, and went for a short time to the 
College of the town of his nativity. 

Norman Macleod entered the University 
of Glasgow in 1827; but he was in no way 
particularly distinguished there; and he 
obtained no honours, except in logic. His 
intimates were men of the highest available 
intellectual qualities, usually his seniors in 
years and experience; and he devoted his 
spare hours to the study of poetry and 
general literature, without neglecting more 
serious things. One of his peculiarities was 
to dress himself in sailor garb, and to imitate 
the mariner, as far as possible, in his walk 
and talk, although nobody now knows why. 
His letters and his journals rarely touch 



Glasgow 113 

upon his college life or doings; but in his 
later years he was fond of talking about his 
curious experiences in Glasgow; about the 
strange characters he met there ; about the 
conceits, peculiarities, absurdities, and en- 
thusiasms of his friends and acquaintances 
there ; about the occasional social gatherings 
and suppers they indulged in, where the 
dissipation was of the mildest form; and 
about the long, speculative talks they had, 
lasting often far into the night. Later he 
studied his well-applied divinity under Dr. 
Chalmers in Edinburgh. 

The quantity or the quality of the plays 
written by Tom Taylor during his under- 
graduate days, at Glasgow, is very uncer- 
tain. He began his dramatic composition 
almost before he could form his letters ; and 
he was a playwright, and a player, long 
before he was sent to school. His first 
stage was a loft over his father's stable; his 
company was made up of his juvenile asso- 
ciates ; he was always stage-manager, gener- 
ally leading man, and, not infrequently, 

8 



114 Scottish Universities 

leading lady. His ventures met with a fair 
amount of success, until he introduced thun- 
der and lightning into the more thrilling of 
his melodramas, when on account of their 
dread of fire, the authorities interfered and 
brought the performances to an abrupt con- 
clusion. He then immediately turned his 
attention to the production of puppet enter- 
tainments of a comparatively harmless char- 
acter. According to his own account of his 
career, he became the manager of a troupe 
of marionettes. His sister was associated 
with him as costumer; but he was the 
builder of his own theatre; the painter of 
his own scenes; the author of his own 
comedies and tragedies; and the manufac- 
turer, and creator, of his own actors. And 
then he went to school and to college. At 
Glasgow he won three gold medals ; but he 
migrated to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 
1837, when he was twenty. 



Aberdeen 



"5 



Aberdeen 

IT is a little startling to ordinary persons, 
and not altogether gratifying to the 
Aberdonians in particular, to read of James 
Fourth of Scotland as writing, towards the 
end of the fifteenth century, to Pope Alex- 
ander Sixth of Rome, an epistle confessing 
that the inhabitants of Aberdeen were ignor- 
ant of letters, and almost uncivilised. He 
declared that there was, among them, no 
person fit to preach the Word of God to the 
people, or to administer the sacraments of 
the Church. And he prayed the Pontiff to 
recognise the benighted condition of the 
place, and to found a college in the North, 
for the benefit of those youths who were 
too far away from St. Andrews and from 
Glasgow to avail themselves of the privileges 
of those already existing institutions. The 
117 



ii8 Scottish Universities 

result was a **Bull," obtained in 1490, and 
the ratification of it in the Scottish Parlia- 
ment ten years later. And so the light of 
learning was first shed upon Aberdeen. 

The college was dedicated to the Holy 
Mother, and was originally called the Col- 
lege of St. Mary of the Nativity. But, as 
its scope was broadened, and, as the arts 
and sciences began to run side by side with 
divinity, it became known as "King's Col- 
lege"; no doubt in honour of that same 
James Fourth of Scotland, who had done so 
much to foster it. 

Ignorance of letters, in their simplest 
form, it may be said in defence of Aberdeen, 
was very general in those days, as the his- 
torians tell us ; and it is now impossible to 
prove that a single Scottish baron a century 
before the establishment of King's College 
could write his own name. 

King's was particularly fortunate from the 
beginning. Bishop Elphinstone, James's 
guide, philosopher, and friend in that part 
of the Kingdom, and the instigator of the 



Aberdeen 119 

institution, richly endowed it; and, at his 
death, he left for its continuance, what was 
then a large sum of money. Its earliest 
professors were men faithful, sincere, and 
eminently fitted for their work; and it was 
fairly well housed. Its Chapel, still stand- 
ing at the beginning of this twentieth cen- 
tury, carefully restored and famous for its 
carvings of wood, is all that is left, now, of 
the original structure, except the crown- 
capped tower, picturesque, and beloved of 
all Aberdonians. 

In the Chapel, during term-time, in these 
days, but on Sunday mornings only, are 
services held; not compulsory, although 
largely attended by the students, male and 
female, generally in cap and gown. The 
uniform, by the way, is not compulsory 
either. 

No little solemn, old-fashioned ceremony 
is observed on these occasions. Behind an 
ofificer, bearing the mace, marches the Prin- 
cipal, robed. He is followed by the pro- 
fessors, also robed, walking according to 



I20 Scottish Universities 

seniority of appointment. The Head of the 
College occupies the ancient throne of the 
pre-Reformation bishops ; and the professors 
sit in stalls, to the right and to the left of him, 
within what was, originally, the high altar. 

The students have seats reserved in the 
body of the building; the young women 
being separated from the young men by the 
breadth of the aisle. At the west end of 
the edifice are beautifully carved stalls, in 
which sit, on one side, those relatives and 
friends of the Faculty who belong to the 
gentler sex. On the other side is accommo- 
dation for any male person who may enjoy 
the privilege of that extremity of the sanc- 
tuary. They are as firmly separated as if it 
were a Jewish synagogue or a Quaker meet- 
ing-house. The aged pulpit, brought from 
the Cathedral of Aberdeen, bears the arms 
of a prelate of the middle of the sixteenth 
century. 

Bishop Elphinstone, the founder, sleeps 
under a slab of black marble, in front of the 
altar; and near by is a slab of blue-stone 



Aberdeen 121 

commemorating Hector Boece, the historian 
and the earliest Principal of King's. Why 
these monuments are not of Aberdeen 
granite is not explained, nor is it known, 
now, what became of the metal effigies 
which once ornamented the tombs of these 
ancient, original worthies. These brasses, 
certainly merited a better fate than to have 
stopped a modern hole, or to have kept the 
wind away from some later-day vandal. 

The long-abolished custom of college 
residence was tried, again, at King's, about 
1750, on the ground that the students, 
scattered in lodgings about the town, were 
badly looked after in the matter of physical 
care and attention. There were two scales 
of living, one cheaper, and, naturally, poorer, 
than the other. There were public prayers 
every morning at eight ; and the gates were 
shut every evening at nine. All this was 
looked upon, however, as bordering too 
much upon the rejected and abhorred con- 
vent and monastic system, and it was soon 
given up. 



122 Scottish Universities 

Mr. John Malcolm Bulloch, in his History 
of the University, says that this residential 
part of King's College, long since vanished, 
seems to have been upon the site of the 
present Greek and Latin class-rooms. It 
consisted of about seventeen chambers, 
named after the heavenly bodies, as Jupiter, 
Luna, Saturn, Mercury, and the like; or 
after the signs of the Zodiac, as Taurus, 
Gemini, Leo, Virgo, and Scorpio. 

The library of King's College, now prop- 
erly housed, is not particularly remarkable 
or distinguished, except for its troubles and 
trials. It was originally built on the wall 
of the Chapel, when it consisted, chiefly, of 
purely ecclesiastical works. About the end 
of the second decade of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, what the borrowers and stealers had 
left of it was carried to the Jewel House. 
A few years later, the room v/as enlarged 
and repaired; about 1775, it was nearly de- 
stroyed by fire; and the books were kept 
in the nave of the Chapel until 1870, when 
the present Library building was erected. 



Aberdeen 123 

Marischal College, in the New Town of 
Aberdeen, was founded in 1593, by George, 
Fifth Earl Marischal of Scotland, hence its 
name. There would seem to be no particu- 
lar reason for two academies so near to- 
gether; but, perhaps, the New Town, then 
more important and more populous than 
the Old, was a little jealous that a poor vil- 
lage, consisting of a single street, should be 
the municipal seat of learning. But, more 
probably, there was a feeling that King's 
College leaned too much towards the old 
order of things religious; that particular 
Earl Marischal, the founder, being a zealous 
member of the Reformed Church. He and 
his heirs retained the right of appointing 
Principal and Faculty, until the family 
estates were forfeited, in 171 5, when the 
last Earl Marischal found himself in serious 
difficulties with the Crown, which assumed 
the patronage. 

The earliest home of Marischal College 
was in the old monastery of the Grey 
Friars. When it was about a century old. 



124 Scottish Universities 

— before its second "Jubilee," so to speak, 
— other and somewhat better quarters, on 
the same site, were built for it. But neither 
its first nor its second shell was considered 
worthy of the spirit and the soul within 
it, and in 1841, the central block of the 
still existing buildings was finished and oc- 
cupied. On a carefully preserved stone from 
the older structure is cut, in relief, and in 
very ancient style of lettering, the family 
motto of the Keiths, Earls Marischal: — 
"Thay Haif Said: Quhat Say Thay? Lat 
Thame Say." 

Like the famous inscription at Stratford- 
on-Avon, which begs good friends to spare 
the bones of Shakspere, and which is be- 
lieved to be of earlier date than Shakspere's 
time, the Keith motto, slightly altered, is 
to be found elsewhere in Scotland. There 
still exists in the town of St. Andrews, near 
the Old Abbey wall, an aged stone lintel 
upon which, according to tradition, the sub- 
ject of a good deal of malicious gossip 
carved with his own hand, and in rude let- 



Aberdeen 125 

ters, the sentences: — "They Have Said. 
And They Will Say. Let Them Be Saying." 
His neighbours may have appreciated the 
force of the rebuke. But, no doubt, they 
went on "saying" all the same. Just as 
the world answered the Marischal query in 
Aberdeen, "What Say They? " by saying a 
great deal more ; and saying it with unpleas- 
ant and unfavourable emphasis. 

Within a comparatively few years, marked 
and valuable additions have been made to 
Marischal, chiefly through the munificent 
gifts of Dr. Charles Mitchell, a wealthy and 
very generous patron, who built, and do- 
nated, the Mitchell Hall, and Tower, which 
bear his name. Here is housed the Students* 
Union, with its debating hall, luncheon, 
concert, billiard, and smoking rooms ; while 
on the floor above is the large and imposing 
chamber in which take place the graduating 
exercises and the other serious and solemn 
functions of the University. 

For a great many years there was a visible 
and active lack of harmony between the 



126 Scottish Universities 

students of King's and Marischal, which, 
now and then, resulted in rows between 
Gown and Gown, with Town as a passive, 
but interested, spectator. And it is hinted 
that the Faculty of each institution encour- 
aged, rather than discouraged, the trouble. 
But, in the course of time, harmony was 
established, until the rivals became as one 
flesh, some forty years ago. 

There was, on both sides, no little opposi- 
tion to the combination, but in 1858, an Act 
was passed for the better government of the 
universities of Scotland, which provided 
that "the University of King's College of 
Aberdeen and Marischal College of Aber- 
deen were to be united and incorporated 
into one university, under the style and 
title of the University of Aberdeen." And 
thus, although still separated in space, they 
are one in title and in spirit ; the arts and 
divinity being taught in the Old Town, 
while medicine, science, and law are taught 
in the New. 

We read that during the last years of 




f^^m i 



Aberdeen 127 

Catholic rule at Aberdeen, the day's duties 
began at six in the morning ; that every one 
in the College, even including the servants, 
was compelled to speak Latin, except in 
cases of necessity, which, no doubt, were 
frequent ; and that the bursars had to wear 
their hoods everywhere, except in chapel 
and in chambers. Those bursars served 
at the common-table, and acted as jani- 
tors, week about. Nearly all the students 
slept in the College buildings then; and 
those who lodged elsewhere were not per- 
mitted to go out between six in the morn- 
ing, and nine in the evening, unless to get 
their meals. It was another duty of the 
bursars, who wore long gowns with white 
belts, to see that the rich took no advantage 
of those who were poor in purse; to see 
that the poor were not plundered by the 
drones ; "Doronery" seeming to be synonym- 
ous with wealth. The rules for the exclu- 
sion of women were very strictly enforced ; 
and celibacy was compulsory. As late as 
the first quarter of the seventeenth century, 



128 Scottish Universities 

every professor was "to remain a single 
person, and no ways to marry a wife, so long 
as he remained in said office." Up to that 
time, the graduating students were in the 
habit of entertaining the Faculty at ban- 
quets, each student being assessed no small 
sum for that purpose. But the parents 
complained of the cost of these feastings; 
and, in 1628, the practice was abandoned, 
although the assessments continued. The 
money went no longer for **drinke," but 
for books to increase the library; each 
volume containing the donor's name, and 
an expression of his thankful remembrance 
for his education. The money was certainly 
spent for a better purpose; but it is not 
recorded that the parents were any better 
pleased at the additional expense. 

Provision was made for two hours of 
play every afternoon ; although ' * care was 
taken to employ a spy that none might 
play truant on the links " — which hints 
at golf at Aberdeen as early as 164 1. 
The game figures in a statute of James 



Aberdeen 129 

First (of Scotland) dated some two centuries 
earlier. 

Bowles, target-practice, and football were 
favourite amusements. Bowles were harm- 
less enough, as still they are; but football 
was considered dangerous ; and we read that 
when one townsman complained of being 
sorely injured in the calf by a careless arrow, 
shot from the Quadrangle of Marischal, he 
was told that it might have been worse— the 
shaft might have killed his neighbour's cow, 
and that the matter would be looked into ! 

The Faculty as well as the students had 
their recreations and pleasantries; for it is 
recorded that when the regents of the New 
College ''went across," to visit the profess- 
ors at Old Aberdeen, they were regaled 
with "wyne, tobacco and pypes" ; and that 
a certain Earl of Mar, on one occasion, was 
treated to sack and beer, between smokes. 

A serious Town and Gown battle was 
fought, in 1770, between King's and a band 
of youthful mariners, from the ships in the 
harbour. The sailors seem to have had the 



I30 Scottish Universities 

better of it ; for Gown was driven ignomini- 
ously into the building; the gates of which 
narrowly escaped the assault of a battering- 
ram in enraged seafaring hands. The Prin- 
cipal, however, in all the dignity of his 
office, addressed the attacking force, and 
requested them to come back again the next 
morning to talk it all over quietly. The 
next morning the navigators had other 
things to do, and to think about, and the 
gates were spared. It is believed that the 
undergraduates began it, which is not un- 
likely. Blue-jackets, generally, are offensive 
to scarlet gowns. 

The old names of the class-men at Aber- 
deen are still retained in part. The 
Freshmen are *'Bejans"; the Seniors are 
"Magistrands," as at the beginnings of 
things; although the Juniors are "Tertians," 
now, not "Bachelors." The University, in 
its retention, in greater or lesser measure, of 
some of the academic principles on which it 
was founded, is unlike its sister institutions 
in the Kingdom of Scotland ; and it holds a 



Aberdeen 131 

unique position among all the universities 
of Great Britain as being the first to estab- 
lish a Faculty of Medicine. Medicine was 
a part and parcel of the original curriculum ; 
while it was not taught in Cambridge until 
1540, or in St. Andrews for nearly two cen- 
turies later. 

The Aberdeen undergraduates, especially 
at their general assemblies, have a way of 
handling the obnoxious student which is 
peculiarly their own. They ''pass him up" 
or they ''pass him down" ! If, while at the 
outer edge of the crowd, he should, in any 
way, make himself obnoxious or conspicu- 
ous, the cry is immediately raised: "Pass 
him up." And he is passed up, literally, 
generally upside-down, over the heads of 
his fellows, no matter how great the dis- 
tance; and from hand to hand. If he 
should chance to give offence while in the 
inner circle, some leader exclaims: "Pass 
him down." And down he is passed in the 
same high-handed way. He receives little 
damage, except, perhaps, to his dignity 



132 Scottish Universities 

and to his feelings, unless he resists; and 
then the chief damage is done to his clothes. 

On one occasion of some grand academic 
function, when two Town Counsellors, who 
should have marched in procession with 
their peers to the place of honour reserved 
for municipal authority, appeared a little 
later, and modestly took back seats, it is 
reported that the students demanded that 
they should be "passed up.'* And "passed 
up*' they were, in regular form. They wore 
evening-dress, they were not very light of 
weight, even for grave and serious magis- 
trates, and they did not altogether like it. 
But they submitted as gracefully as possible 
to the ordeal, and they reached the platform 
not very much the worse, although in an 
inverted position. The performance, natur- 
ally, gave great pleasure to the student 
body. 

Perhaps from Aberdeen do some of the 
American universities inherit the pleasing, 
but solemn, custom, at the end of the 
Commencement season, of passing their own 



Aberdeen 133 

"grave old Seniors" through the windows 
of railway carriages out of the college for 
ever, and into the traditional "wide, wide 
world"! 

At the close of the summer session of 
1901 , the students who assembled in Mitchell 
Hall, on the morning of graduation and of 
the conferring of degrees, "passed" nothing 
but silly words, many of them in the worst 
of taste, and none of them witty or amus- 
ing. There were groans, and ironical 
cheers, and cat-calls, and scraps of song, 
for the utterance of which there never 
seemed to be any particular reason or ex- 
cuse. They were not even silly enough to 
be funny. 

The only young-woman-graduate of the 
occasion, modest, gentle, pretty, in her 
gown and hood, was "capped" with un- 
usual honours, for, as it was announced on 
her appearance on the platform, she had 
* ' nearly swept the board. ' ' She was cheered 
a little, but the cheers seemed to be derisive, 
and not altogether worthy of the subject or 



134 Scottish Universities 

creditable to the cheerers. They kissed, 
very audibly, the backs of their hands to 
her; and she was saluted familiarly and 
affectionately, by her first name, ''Clemen- 
tina," which, by the way, was not her first 
name as printed on the programme. 

Peculiarly outrageous, and absolutely in- 
excusable upon any grounds of morals or of 
decency, was the undergraduate conduct 
during the opening religious services, short 
as they were. It was bad enough when 
men applauded, and even encored, the 
prayer, according to a long-established, and 
most disreputable, custom. But when they 
interrupted the prayer by frequent calls, to 
the Very Reverend John Lang, the Princi- 
pal, to "Hurry up, Jock!" they were not 
only irreligious, but they were ungentle- 
manly as well, which in some eyes, is worse ; 
and is absolutely without excuse. It is 
pleasant to realise that these poor students 
shocked their hearers, if they did not shock 
themselves, and each other; and that there 
was not one responsive smile in the hall. 



Aberdeen 135 

As a certain distinguished Scotsman, who 
is sometimes looked upon as a heathen who 
never went to college, who never sought, or 
received, a degree, who was only a plough- 
man, by birth, but who was a man, and a 
gentleman "for a' that" — as Burns once 
said: "An atheist's laugh is a poor ex- 
change, for Deity offended." And Aber- 
deen, on this particular occasion, made one 
Scotsman's son, for the only time in his 
life, ashamed of Scotsmen ! 

George Macdonald, who was a student of 
King's College, sent Alec Forbes to Aber- 
deen from Howglen in the third decade of 
the nineteenth century ; and he paints an 
excellent, and, no doubt, a correct, picture 
of the social life there at that period; which 
is too long, however, to be even condensed 
here. Alec studied anatomy, and he fell in 
love, and into bad company when his love 
failed him. And his guardian angel was an 
eccentric librarian, who is too good to be 
true, unfortunately, and who must be a pure 
creation of the novelist. 



136 Scottish Universities 

Aberdeen, like the sister institutions in 
Scotland, has its lately founded Union. And 
it has its more ancient smaller social clubs 
for the advancement of learning, and, in a 
limited way, for the exchange of thought on 
various subjects gay and grave. The average 
number of students is larger than at St. An- 
drews and much smaller than at Edinburgh 
and Glasgow. The gown is of the regulation 
scarlet. There are two sessions during the 
year; and there is a University magazine 
called Alma Mater. It first appeared in 
1883; it is published weekly during the 
winter term; it costs twopence a number; 
and it is under the general management of 
the Students' Representative Council. 

There are two literary associations, al- 
though not of the University, of which the 
Aberdonians are very proud. One is undis- 
puted fact, the other is very vague, but not 
impossible, tradition. The fact is Lord 
Byron, who, as a boy, attended the Gram- 
mar School of Aberdeen ; and who, with his 
mother, lived, among other places in Aber- 



Aberdeen 137 

deen, at the Broadgate, No. 68, opposite 
Marischal. 

The name "George Gordon," cut by his 
own youthful hand, on the lid of the desk, 
in the youthful way, is said to have been 
visible long after the youth woke up, that 
historical morning in St. James's Street, 
Piccadilly, to find himself famous. 

It is curious that so many of the lovers of 
Scottish verse, who quote '* A man 's a man 
for a' that," and "On, Stanley, on!" 
should forget, when they quote "Maid of 
Athens, ere we part," that Byron, as well 
as Scott, and as well as Burns, was a Scots- 
man. Though born in London, he was 
partly educated in Aberdeen ; his mother 
was a Gordon of Gight and Monkshill, the 
possessor of rich estates in the Dee country ; 
and her husband added her name to his on 
their marriage, the boy being the only son 
of Mr. and Mrs. Byron Gordon. All of this 
Byron remembered throughout his life ; and 
in Do7i Jtian he boasted that he was "half 
a Scot by birth, and bred a whole one." 



138 Scottish Universities 

Moore said that it was always a delight to 
him to meet an Aberdonian in any part of 
the world. In his early voyage to Greece, 
not only the shapes of the mountains but 
the kilts and hardy figures of the Albanesi 
"carried him back to Morven," he declared. 
And in his last fatal expedition, the uniform 
he designed for himself consisted, in part, 
of a Gordon-tartan jacket. 

Shakspere is the tradition. In 1601, the 
town records show that "the King's Servan- 
dis, who playes comedies and stage-playes, " 
arrived in Aberdeen, and received thirty- 
two merks, "by reason that they were re- 
commended by His Majesty's special letter, 
and has played some of thair comedies 
here." The company had been organised 
under the patronage of Elizabeth ; and "His 
Majesty" was James Sixth of Scotland, 
who was to become James First of England 
two years later. Shakspere is fondly sup- 
posed, by the Aberdonians, to have been an 
active member of this company, and to have 
absorbed then and there some of the ideas 





in ffl 




MARISCHAL COLLEGE, ABERDEEN. 



Aberdeen 139 

and figures of Macbeth. Witches, at that 
time, were important inhabitants of the 
neighbourhood, and their incantations and 
blasted heaths were very familiar to the 
people of Aberdeen. 

The players were well bestowed. The 
Magistrates entertained them at dinner, 
and gave the freedom of the city to Master 
Laurence Fletcher, the Manager. Whether 
or no the Town saw Shakspere cannot be 
determined. But the Gown, in gown or out 
of it, certainly saw the " stage-play es, " from 
the back seats and galleries ; and no doubt, 
by stealth. Gown rarely misses a show of 
any kind ! 

Hector Boece, whose name was variously 
spelled, by himself, and by his contempor- 
aries, Boece, Boyis, Boyes, Boiss, Boys, 
and Boice, was older than King's College. 
He is supposed to have received some por- 
tion of his earlier education in Aberdeen; 
and he is known to have studied, later, in 
Paris, where he was brought into intimate 
and familiar intercourse with Erasmus. In 



I40 Scottish Universities 

the year 1500, he was induced by Bishop 
Elphinstone to become the first Principal 
of Aberdeen, moved thereto by the extra- 
ordinary richness of the salary offered, 
which, according to Dr. Johnson, was forty 
marks a year, a sum equal to two pounds 
three shillings and four pence, or about 
eleven dollars in the subsequent currency of 
the United States of America. This income 
the Scots-hating lexicographer of Fleet 
Street declared to be quite sufificient, not 
only to supply the needs, but to support 
the rank and dignity, of the President's high 
ofHce. In the matter of this yearly stipend, 
however, the worthy Doctor was either 
deceiving, or himself deceived; for other 
historians show that the Principal was in 
receipt of fifteen times two pounds per 
annum, besides having a pension of fifty 
pounds Scots from the King. And, on one 
occasion he was presented, by the Town 
Council of Aberdeen, "with a tun of Wine, 
or twenty pounds Scots, to help him buy 
his bonnets." 



Aberdeen 141 

Principal Boece was a valuable man to the 
College. He is best remembered now as 
the author of a quite forgotten History of 
Scotland, written in Latin. But he it was, 
of some training in the then little known art 
of healing, who persuaded Bishop Elphin- 
stone to establish the Medical Faculty in 
the University ; and thus he made Aberdeen 
the pioneer of all the teachers of medicine 
in the British Isles. 

Alexander Ross whom Burns styled "our 
Own brother" and "a wild warlock," gained 
a bursary in Marischal College, in 17 14; and 
the degree of Master of Arts, in 1718. His 
Fortunate Shepherdess is not remembered 
now, even in Scotland, except in his native 
Aberdeenshire, where it is said to be as 
popular, and to be quoted as much, as is 
The Cotter s Saturday Night, The Pilgrims 
Progress, or TJie Gentle Shepherd himself. 
He wrote verses in his college days, perhaps 
this particular verse, but he did not appear 
in print until more than half a century 
later; and he was nearly seventy when his 



142 Scottish Universities 

Fortunate Shepherdess was introduced to the 
world in 1768. The young tender of sheep 
was called "Helenore," her humble lover 
was ''Rosalind," not a common name, 
among men, in the rural districts of North 
Britain even then; and their story is told 
in the Scottish dialect of Ross's period. 
"Rosalind" and ''Helenore," as appella- 
tions, are not quite so happy as are "Touch- 
stone" and "Audrey"; but then Audrey 
thanked the gods that she was not poetical, 
and the creator of Helenore was "a wild 
warlock." 

Alexander Cruden, who styled himself 
"Alexander the Corrector," was a son of 
Aberdeen, and a student of her University. 
When he entered Marischal cannot, on ac- 
count of the loss of the register, be deter- 
mined, but he remained there long enough, 
without making any marked impression 
upon anybody, to receive his degree of 
M.A. At about that period, he developed 
a melancholy madness, whether from the 
effects of a disappointment in love, or from 



Aberdeen 143 

the effects of the bite of a mad dog, the 
authorities differ; the symptoms having 
been considered, by contemporary local ex- 
perts, as not at all unlike ! 

He conceived the idea, at an early age, 
that he was especially designed by Provi- 
dence to set the world right ; and he began 
his career as "Corrector," after leaving 
Aberdeen, by reading proofs for a London 
printer. 

By his Concordance of the Bible, surely a 
monumental work, and a literary landmark 
of no mean value, he is now known, and by 
none other of the books he published, in the 
leisure hours of a bookseller's life. The 
fact that an ingenious Philadelphian pro- 
fessed to have discovered, and corrected, no 
fewer than ten thousand errors in the Concord- 
ance, which he pirated and printed in 1836, 
giving Mr. Cruden no credit for anything 
but his mistakes, does not lessen the obliga- 
tions which Biblical students, the world 
over, owe to Cruden. Nor does it make 
him less of an honour to Aberdeen, his 



144 Scottish Universities 

Alma Mater, despite the fact that a dog bit 
him, in his youth, or that the daughter of 
one of the local Aberdeen clergymen did not 
respond to his juvenile, and undergraduate, 
but eccentric offers of love and devotion. 
James Beattie, author of a once very 
popular poem called TJie Minstrel, entered 
Marischal in 1749, when he was fourteen; 
and he remained there as an undergraduate, 
for four years, quickly gaining a bursary, or 
free scholarship. He devoted his spare 
hours to the study of Virgil, as translated 
by Dryden; to Thomson's Seasons ; and to 
Paradise Lost, not neglecting music, of which 
he was passionately fond. In 1760, he be- 
came the Professor of Moral Philosophy at 
Marischal, occupying the chair during the 
rest of his active life, lecturing, and writing 
poems of varying merit. The first book of 
The Minstrel appeared in 1771. During 
occasional visits to London, he became in- 
timate with Gray, Garrick, and their con- 
temporaries among the wits and the players ; 
and he even won the good opinion of Dr. 




GATE OF OLD MARISCHAL COLLEGE, ABERDEEN. 



Aberdeen 145 

Johnson. "We all love Beattie," remarked 
the Doctor to Boswell once, "and Mrs. 
Thrale says if ever she has another husband, 
she '11 have Beattie." 

This was praise indeed! But one wife 
was enough for Beattie. And Mrs. Thrale 
subsequently made other arrangements. 

No son of the University of Aberdeen 
ever succeeded in attracting so much atten- 
tion to himself as did James Macpherson, 
the translator, or the inventor, of "Ossian." 
He entered King's College in 1753, and he 
migrated to Marischal in 1755 ; but he took 
no degree at either. During his under- 
graduate days, in Aberdeen and in Edin- 
burgh, where he is supposed to have studied 
divinity for a time, he is said to have 
produced upwards of four thousand of the 
lines which were attributed to the semi- 
historical Scottish Bard ; beginning his versi- 
fication at the early age of seventeen. How 
much Ossian had to do with these, and with 
the subsequent lines of the poems, was never 
decided in Macpherson's own time. 



146 Scottish Universities 

His supporters and his detractors were 
equally enthusiastic, and equally divided; 
and Dr. Johnson, during that never-to-be- 
forgotten "Journey to the Hebrides," took 
some pains to look into the matter for him- 
self. He concluded, naturally, as both 
Ossian and Macpherson were Scotsmen, that 
there could be no virtue in either of them ; 
and, anticipating the history of Martin 
Chuszlewity he declared, in effect, that 
Ossian was the Mrs. Harris of Scottish 
literature, while Macpherson was the Sairey 
Gamp. 

Johnson went so far as to call Macpher- 
son names ; and Macpherson threatened to 
convert Johnson with an oaken cudgel. It 
was a very pretty quarrel, so far as it went ; 
it moved Horace Walpole to assert that 
Macpherson was a bully, and that Johnson 
was a brute; it gave Macpherson a good 
deal of notoriety ; but it did not settle the 
question of the authorship of Ossian 's 
Poems. 

George Colman, the younger, after learn- 



Aberdeen 147 

ing nothing but mischief at Westminster 
School, and at Christ Church College, Ox- 
ford, according to his own confession, was 
sent to King's College in Aberdeen "to be 
tamed. " He described himself there as * * an 
extraneous animal in a crowd of scholastic 
yahoos" ; and there he is said to have found 
in Roderick Macleod, Professor and, after 
Colman's time, Principal, some of the amus- 
ing eccentricities which he immortalised in 
Dr. Pangloss, the apparently impossible 
tutor to Dick Dawlas in TJie Heir at Law, 
Colman wrote one or two plays during his 
two years' residence in Aberdeen ; but they 
were as negative, in their way, as was his 
college career. 

John Stuart Blackie was sent to Marischal 
when he was twelve, and a little later he 
went to Edinburgh. In 1841, he was estab- 
lished in the then newly founded Chair of 
the Humanities, in Marischal, where he 
remained until 1852. He did not enjoy his 
work ; for there was a great deal of what he 
considered drudgery about it. When his 



hS Scottish Universities 

pupils were not young boys, fresh from the 
grammar schools of neighbouring towns, 
unprepared and indifferent, they were ma- 
ture men, fresh from the plough, eager to 
learn, but not quick to understand. And 
he felt that none of them were sympathetic 
or inspiring, although they were fair repre- 
sentatives of the stuff of which undergradu- 
ates were made in the Scottish universities, 
at the middle of the century just closed. 

If John Hill Burton began his career of 
book-hunting in Aberdeen, his native town, 
it must have been under the pressure of 
limited means, for his father left him in the 
grammar school with little but a clear head 
and a brave heart to stalk his game with. 
He gained a bursary at Marischal, and upon 
his graduation he was apprenticed to a local 
lawyer. The whole of his early life was a 
hard struggle for subsistence and education; 
and he is supposed to have done some sort of 
straggling literary work at college as a help 
to his own support, although the nature and 
the quantity of that work are unknown. 



St. Andrews 



149 



St. Andrews 

ST. ANDREWS is the most picturesque, 
as she is the most venerable, of the 
Scottish university towns. The mother of 
them all, she still sits, dignified and serene 
in her beautiful, grey old age, on the spot 
upon which she was born nearly five cen- 
turies ago. Time seems to have passed her 
respectfully by; restoration and improve- 
ment appear to have let her severely alone. 
The sites and the buildings, so long as the 
latter would hold together, which she knew 
in her youth, satisfy her now. She has not 
been placed upon the top of a high hill, in 
brand-new brick-and-mortar garments to be 
seen of men. Even the elsewhere all-per- 
vading electric tram-cars do not attempt to 
approach her. She made, and she keeps, the 
ancient arch-episcopal capital of Scotland 
151 



152 Scottish Universities 

the centre, and the seat, of Scottish learn- 
ing; and she is, perhaps, the most perfect 
specimen of a university town, pure and 
simple, in all the world to-day. 

Even before the establishment of the 
University, early in the second decade of 
the fifteenth century, St. Andrews occupied 
no small space in the pages of Scottish his- 
tory, from the period when tradition brought 
certain bones of the Apostle Andrew into 
her Bay, and thereby gave a name to the 
town, and a patron saint to Scotland. In 
the first half of the twelfth century, she was 
made a free burgh, the building of her 
cathedral was begun about 1160, and the 
castle was the palace of the Episcopal Prim- 
ate of Scotland from the year 1200, until 
the Reformation. 

The University was founded by a Bishop 
of St. Andrews in 141 1 ; and it was so well 
founded and supported, in its modest way, 
that it rapidly increased in strength and in 
numbers, until it ultimately included three 
separate colleges and corporations — St. Sal- 



f 




P^?5a 



^^AM 



St. Andrews 153 

vator's, started in 1450, St. Leonard's in 
1512, St. Mary's in 1537. 

In 1742, St. Salvator's and St. Leonard's 
were made one institution, and were called 
the United College. Such, in a few words, 
are the facts and the figures relating to St. 
Andrews. 

The University of St. Andrews, for all 
that, was not very richly endowed with 
money ; and it has had many a hard struggle 
with poverty. Its early professors were not 
paid for their teaching; and for the first few 
years of its existence, the University had 
no established home of its own. The lec- 
tures were delivered wherever place could be 
found ; and the students, as they do now, 
looked out for themselves in the matter of 
lodging and board. 

About 1430, however, according to Mr. 
James Maitland Anderson's History, a cer- 
tain tenement situated on the south side of 
the South Street and called the "Pedagogy" 
was granted by the Bishop "to the Faculty 
of Arts; to the end that the regents and 



154 Scottish Universities 

masters of said Faculty may be able to hold, 
rule, and govern them in Schools of Arts." 

Of this Pedagogy no stone, or sign of 
stone, so far as is now known, exists. It is 
supposed to have gone to pieces before St. 
Mary's College was built upon its ruins, a 
hundred years later. 

St. Andrews is remarkably well supplied 
with bursaries, or free scholarships; although 
some of them are of comparatively small 
money value. Still they help many a 
youth, poor in purse, to the education 
which he seeks and needs. In the begin- 
ning, the bursar's life was a very hard one. 
Even at the end of the eighteenth century, 
his rooms were uncarpeted and very poorly 
furnished. His parlour was about nine feet 
square; and his bed-room, adjoining it, he 
had to share with another. His breakfast 
consisted of a pint of beer, and an oaten 
loaf of the meanest quality. He dined in 
an equally meagre way, in the common- 
hall. The beer was small, and tea and 
coffee, of course, were luxuries unknown. 



St. Andrews 155 

Even when chimneys existed, they gener- 
ally refused to draw; and the unhappy 
bursar was forced to keep himself warm 
by wearing home-knitted gloves of Shetland 
wool on his hands, and by wrapping about 
the rest of his anatomy his inevitable plaid, 
which served him as an overcoat by day and 
as a blanket by night. His heart, however, 
does not seem to have grown cold, or his 
courage to have been frost-bitten. 

Each college has its own principal, or 
president, reigning over his own institution ; 
although the Principal of the United Col- 
lege, now, is the Principal, and resident 
head, of the University. 

The number of students at St. Andrews, 
as compared with the other Scottish univer- 
sities, is very small, almost surprisingly 
small, to those who are not familiar with 
the history and workings of the institution. 
The average annual attendance of matricu- 
lated undergraduates at St. Mary's, during 
the last fifty years, has been estimated at 
thirty-one; that of the United College, one 



156 Scottish Universities 

hundred and thirty-two; making in all one 
hundred and sixty-three, against fifteen or 
twenty times that number at Glasgow or 
Edinburgh. 

The natural, and wholesome, consequence 
is that teachers and taught are brought into 
closer personal contact with each other than 
in the larger sister communities ; the taught 
benefiting, in many ways, by the association. 

The scarlet gown, as bright and as con- 
spicuous, and as scarlet, as is the scarlet 
coat of the British warrior, is a relic of Papal 
rule ; and it is found only in the three pre- 
Reformation colleges. Seen in St. Andrews 
against the prevailing grey of the architect- 
ure, it is peculiarly effective. It is com- 
pulsory in certain of the class-rooms, and 
it is now generally worn, although not of 
necessity, in the streets. The St. Andrews 
man, like his fellows in the sister university 
towns, is entirely freed from College rules 
when he makes his exit from the College 
gates. 

A few years ago the gown was less popular 



i 



4) 




St. Andrews 157 

than it is at present. The undergraduate 
then was obliged to wear it on all occasions, 
and it was regarded as a badge of academic 
youth and freshness, an offensive give-away, 
as it were. Consequently the under-class 
man bought, or hired, old and worn gowns, 
or else he used up his new gown as speedily 
as possible, in order to give himself an air 
of age and of long experience ; oblivious of 
the fact that even the college tailor can not 
make the college man. 

Within a few years, what may be termed 
"an Annex" to St. Andrews has been 
founded at Dundee ; but this is still too 
young to have created any especial literary 
landmarks of its own. 

Another institution of learning at St. 
Andrews is the Madras College, founded by 
Dr. Andrew Bell some seventy years ago. 
It is a preparatory school, and a very excel- 
lent one; but it is not, in any way, under 
University rule. It is on the South Street, 
west of St. Mary's; and on the site of the 
Black Friars' Monastery of which nothing is 



15^ Scottish Universities 

now left but a beautiful fragment of its 
chapel. 

In this chapel, one pleasant, balmy June 
Sunday morning in 1559, John Knox 
preached his famous sermon upon the ejec- 
tion of the buyers and sellers from the 
temple, which sermon so moved his hear- 
ers, according to tradition, that by the fol- 
lowing Wednesday, "Before the sun went 
down there was never an inch of the Monas- 
tery left, but bare walls." 

There were grammar schools at St. An- 
drews long before the establishment of the 
University ; and not the least important of 
them was one supposed to be adjacent to 
the Grey Friars' Chapel. 

St. Salvator's College is on the north side 
of the North Street, east of Butts Wynd. 
As the senior of the three, it was long 
known as "The Auld College," and, by its 
sons, it is still sometimes so called, although 
its class-rooms generally are new. The 
original buildings were described, in the be- 
ginning of the nineteenth century, as being 



St. Andrews 159 

"dingy, and decaying, and Old-World-like, 
but full of interest." On the east and south 
sides were the ruins of the houses in which 
the College-bread was baked and the College- 
beer was brewed. On the north side were 
a long range of barrack-like buildings, with 
class-rooms for Greek and logic* below; 
while above were sleeping-rooms for the 
students, out of which it is gravely affirmed 
that the latest occupants were forcibly 
driven by a ghost. It was, perhaps, the 
ghost of John Knox himself, whose pulpit 
stood in the corner of the long, bare, cold- 
looking common-room, on the west side of 
the Quadrangle. In the hall, the students 
dined, and, now and then, there they were 
preached at out of the pulpit. 

The old class-rooms were swept away 
about fifty years ago; and new and more 
comfortable quarters were built upon the 
same sites, for the accommodation of the 
United College. 

The chapel of St. Salvator's, better 
known, in these days, as the College Church, 



i6o Scottish Universities 

still standing, had originally a heavy, vaulted 
roof of stone, which being considered dan- 
gerous, towards the close of the eighteenth 
century, is said to have been detached for 
safety's sake, in a solid mass, thereby caus- 
ing destruction to the interior of the chapel 
in its fall. 

The fine old tower still stands intact, and 
in it still sound the famous old bells of 
the now United College, "Elizabeth" of 
St. Leonard's, and "Kate Kennedy" of St. 
Salvator's. 

One of the most serious of the changes 
made in St. Andrews by the University 
authorities, since the beginning of their 
existence, was the removal, from the calen- 
dar, of the "Day of Kate Kennedy " as an 
annual festival in College circles. It is said 
of Miss Kennedy, that she was a daughter 
of Bishop Kennedy, the founder of St. Sal- 
vator's; but this is questioned by some 
historians, on the ground that bishops, In 
Dr. Kennedy's time, the last half of the 
fifteenth century, were not permitted to 




'//- -/"^ 



'1 



S =) 

t o 



Q 

z 
< 




St. Andrews i6i 

have daughters. At any rate, the Bishop 
gave to the College a bell, dated 1460, 
which was to sound the hours, and thereby 
to notify the students when to enter the 
class-rooms, and, especially, when to leave 
them; and he named the bell "Katharine." 
The tongue of Katharine has made a pleas- 
ant noise, familiar in the ears of St. An- 
drews men for four hundred and fifty years 
now : she was a mature young woman when 
America was discovered, and she still is 
clattering, in the tower of the College 
Chapel; although her* 'Day" is gone, and 
despite the fact that the custodian confesses 
that she is cracked. 

There is a tradition that when her tongue 
gave out, from long and constant use, some 
years ago, a devout student sent to the pul- 
pit, one Sunday morning, a note asking the 
prayers of the congregation for an afflicted 
lady who had lost her voice. The preacher 
fell into the trap, and read the notice, to the 
great delight of the student body. After 
the repairs were finished, and Miss Kennedy 



i62 Scottish Universities 

was in a condition to make herself heard as 
usual, another request came from the same 
source, asking the thanks of the congrega- 
tion on behalf of a lady who had regained 
her voice! But by this time the Princi- 
pal, with all the Town and Gown, had 
heard the story, and the prayer was not 
offered. 

The undergraduates, nobody knows for 
how many generations, and nobody knows 
why, celebrated "Kate Kennedy's Day," 
a movable feast, generally observed on a 
Saturday, in a way peculiarly their own. 

They formed a great procession, mounted 
and on foot. Kate herself was impersonated 
by some smooth-faced youth ; Mephistophe- 
les was in her train ; and they went about 
the streets distributing copies of a journal 
called The Armual, which was dedicated to 
the Principal, and to the professors, of the 
United College; and was not always entirely 
respectful in its character. They visited the 
homes of all the dignitaries, where they 
made demonstrations of various sorts, some 



St. Andrews 163 

of them eulogistic, others as disrespectful 
as was The Annual. And the result, at last, 
was absolute suppression ; to the satisfaction 
of the Faculties, and to the regret of the 
students. 

St. Salvator, at the outset, was what we 
would now consider "very select." Pro- 
vision was made in its charter for the 
apostolic number of thirteen persons only. 
There was to be a Master of Theology, who 
was to be, also, the Provost; a licentiate, a 
Bachelor, four Masters of Arts, in priest's 
orders, and six Poor scholars. The rules 
were exceedingly strict, and the poor schol- 
ars, and the poor masters, would seem to 
have had a poor time of it. They had all 
of them to live within the bounds of the 
College, and no one was permitted to absent 
himself for more than thirty-one days in 
succession, on pain of rustication or expul- 
sion. The six Poor scholars gradually 
increased their numbers (they were poor in 
purse, not in scholarship, it should be ex- 
plained), but the new-comers were forced 



1 64 Scottish Universities 

not only to obey the statutes and the laws 
of the College in all particulars, but to 
maintain themselves, which was, perhaps, 
a more serious business. And so in the 
course of time, a long time as time is reck- 
oned in the New World, St. Salvator's, 
having absorbed St. Leonard's, became 
what it now is, the main-spring of the 
United College, with about thirteen profess- 
ors, as many lecturers, and some ten times 
thirteen students of the male sex ; with seven 
times thirteen sweet-girl-undergraduates; 
the great majority of these, without regard 
to sex, seeking, and obtaining their degrees. 
\The two colleges at St. Andrews differ in 
this respect from Glasgow and Edinburgh, 
and are more like the English and the 
American universities. ^ 

It will interest the American collegiate 
youth, perhaps, to learn that a sign at the 
entrance to St. Salvator's proclaims the 
serious fact that "No Smoking is allowed" 
within its precincts, and there is still an 
existent law printed, and posted in a con- 



St. Andrews 165 

spicuous place, forbidding students to carry 
fire-arms or knives. 

Mr. Andrew Lang tells how, in his own 
student-days, he met a very aged man, who 
discoursed eloquently upon the poverty of 
the students of the United College when 
the last century was very young. The old 
man "had even seen one of them peeling 
potatoes with his razor." Although why a 
student, who could afford a razor, could not 
afford a knife, or why the student did not 
boil his potatoes in their own skins, neither 
Mr. Lang nor his informant has explained. 

That sense of humour which the Scots- 
man is supposed to lack, but which, never- 
theless is very strong in the Scotsman, was 
certainly fully developed in the case of Prof. 
Duncan of the United College. Stories 
about his quaint ways of dealing with his 
pupils would fill a volume. By old statutes, 
fines were imposed as punishments; and the 
sons of rich fathers not infrequently escaped 
their lectures by the payment of small sums. 
For the sake of convenience, Prof. Duncan 



1 66 Scottish Universities 

was in the habit of letting these sixpences 
accumulate. On one occasion, he called 
upon two young gentlemen in his class-room 
to hand out, each, five shillings then owing 
to the exchequer for neglect of academic 
duties. The first, in response, laid two half- 
crown silver pieces upon the regent's desk; 
the second, who thought he had a sense of 
humour exceedingly keen, handed out one 
hundred and twenty half-penny pieces, col- 
lected at the cost of great trouble and 
patience, in liquidation of his debt. Dun- 
can immediately remitted the fine of the 
believer in silver payments; and swept the 
coppers into his capacious pocket, explain- 
ing that small change was scarce, and always 
useful. The joke was not on the professor! 
St. Leonard's was, at the outset, a hospi- 
tal built to shelter the devout pilgrims who 
went to St. Andrews to get some sort of 
benefit out of the miracle-working bones 
of Scotland's patron saint. After the relics 
lost their charm, the hospital became a nun- 
nery for elderly females, who did not ap- 



St. Andrews 167 

preciate its privileges, or behave altogether 
in a proper and respectful way. And so the 
nunnery was turned into a college, in 15 12, 
and went into a better business. 

At the time of the coalition with St. Sal- 
vator's, St. Leonard's was the richer insti- 
tution; but St. Salvator's was in better 
physical condition, and it was accepted as 
the home of the Union. The buildings of 
St. Leonard's lying on the south side of the 
South Street, between the Pends and what 
is known now as Abbey Street, were, long 
ago, deserted by the University, and neg- 
lected by the town, and the fine old chapel 
was permitted to go to ruin. But a pictur- 
esque ruin it is. "Picturesque" is what Mr. 
Polonias would have termed a 'Vile phrase," 
but like "mobled queen " it "is good," and 
no other word seems to fit St. Andrews so 
well. 

In the eastern part of old St. Leonard's, 
Sir David Brewster lived for twenty-three 
years. He remodelled the front, preserving, 
as far as was possible, the ancient aspect and 



1 68 Scottish Universities 

form. The western part, in later years, was 
the home of Sir Hugh Lyon Playfair. 

These two buildings were formerly occu- 
pied by the professors and students, each 
having a room to himself, facing on the 
wooden galleries, reached by outside stair- 
cases only. Mr. Hay Fleming quotes, from 
an inventory of 1544, the contents of one of 
the best of these chambers, supposed to 
have been occupied by the Principal himself. 
The furniture consisted, in part, of the fol- 
lowing articles — the spelling of the list being 
modernised, and the words, as far as possible, 
put into present-day English. In the first 
room were two standard beds ; the far side 
of oak, the near side of the fruits of fir. 
Item : One feather bed, and one white 
plaid of four ells, and one covering, woven 
o'er with images— probably a patchwork, or 
"crazy, quilt." Item: another old bed, 
filled with straws, and one covering of green. 
Item : a stool of elm, with another chair of 
little price, etc. 

Fifty years later, we read that there was 



p-«n- 




St. Andrews 169 

in every chamber one board ; and that one 
form pertained thereto; that there were 
"glassen windows," and that the most part 
of all the chambers was ceiled above; and 
the floors beneath laid with boards. Among 
the vessels were two silver pieces, one mazer, 
with common cups and stoups, three dozen 
silver spoons, one silver salt-fat, a water 
basin, and an iron chimney fixed in the hall. 
In the kitchen was an iron chimney, with 
such vessels as were necessary therein ; with 
fixed boards, and almeries. All this was, 
no doubt, caviare to the general student in 
the matter of comfort and luxury ; the ordi- 
nary man faring not nearly so well. Out- 
side stairs may still be seen on some of the 
more ancient houses in the town ; and there 
are still standard, or four-posted, beds, and 
stools of elm, and common stoups which are 
also beds, with posts; and almeries, which 
are presses, or cupboards for the reception 
of domestic utensils; and mazers, which 
are drinking-cups; and boards, which are 
tables. 



170 Scottish Universities 

The allowance of food, in the early days, 
Mr. Lang tells us, was four ounces of bread 
at breakfast and supper; eight ounces at 
dinner. On "flesh-days" they had broth 
and a dish of meat; on "meagre-days" they 
had fish. The gates were opened at five 
A.M. in summer, at six A.M. in winter. They 
were shut at eight P.M. in winter, at nine 
P.M. in summer. No woman was admitted, 
except one, a laundress, who must be over 
fifty years of age. 

The students had to wear cap and gown 
in the city. No gaudy head-coverings were 
permitted; their hair could not be long 
enough to hide their ears. They were not 
allowed to give private suppers in the Col- 
lege; and continued absence from chapel 
was punished by expulsion. These and 
other equally stringent rules were estab- 
lished in 1544. 

At St. Leonard's the staff of professors 
was larger than that at St. *Salvator's, and 
the students a little more numerous. But 
the rules and regulations were equally strict 



St. Andrews 171 

and severe. Until the Reformation it was a 
purely monastic institution. The applicants 
for admission presented themselves, on 
bended knees, before the Principal; and 
begged to be received into the House "for 
the love of our Lord Jesus Christ." The 
age limit was between fifteen and twenty. 
Religious observances, naturally, received a 
large share of attention. The poor young 
scholars were permitted to speak in Latin 
only. Bread and beer were the ordinary 
bill of fare, with now and then a bit of fish, 
or flesh, or kail thrown into the pot. 

The students did their own house-work, 
and they did the cooking, in turn ; they were 
forbidden to go to the town on any sort of 
pleasure bent; forbidden to meet together 
at nights ; forbidden to play football, or to 
carry knives. They might indulge in light 
amusements on the links once a week, but 
always under the eyes of the masters ; and 
only once a week. If they required other 
out-door exercise, they were allowed to hoe 
the weeds in the garden. In-door exercise, 



172 Scottish Universities 

consisting of dusting, scrubbing, sweeping, 
and general cleaning, was considered all that 
was necessary to develop their muscles. It 
was not what modern college men would 
consider a wild life, even after Scotland 
freed itself from Papal rule, and had an 
established Church of its own. 

The chapel of St. Leonard's was a fine 
one in its day, with an interesting history ; 
and what time and decay have left of it, is 
well worth looking at now. It is not visible 
from the South Street. But a few steps will 
lead one to an iron gateway through which 
the ruins may be inspected. The name St. 
Leonard's is now perpetuated in the modern 
St. Leonard's School for Girls. 

St. Mary's, the youngest of the colleges 
occupies the oldest site; for, as has been 
seen, it followed the original Pedagogy, on 
the South Street's south side. 

Its class-rooms are few and limited in 
space; but they are comfortable enough, 
and large enough to hold the thirty odd 
men who gather in them to listen to the 



St. Andrews 173 

lectures of the Principal and of his fellow 
professors. 

St. Mary's was restricted to the teaching 
of divinity early in its career; and a Divinity 
School it still remains. Its Principal is 
styled the "Very Reverend," and the letters 
D.D. follow the names of its three other 
professors. It has been a nourishing mother 
to so many eminent theologians that the 
most complete and comprehensive of the 
local guide-books to St. Andrews declares 
itself as being too short of space even to 
mention their names, with the single excep- 
tion of the name of Hamilton, which, at one 
period, was so frequent as to stand almost 
alone. Archbishop Hamilton completed 
the buildings. Out of the fifteen students 
who entered in 1552, five were Hamiltons; 
and there were five Hamiltons among the 
nine professors on the list in 1569. 

This will remind American readers of the 
Alexanders at Princeton, and of the Adamses 
in the University which is on the banks of 
the River Charles. 



174 Scottish Universities 

St. Mary's is no longer a residential col- 
lege. But when the students and their 
teachers both occupied the buildings, two 
earnest professors — neither of them called 
Hamilton, by the way — used, unconsciously, 
to play the comedy of Box and Cox. They 
were in complete sympathy, in many ways, 
although very unlike in their habits. We 
are told how Rutherford, Professor of 
Divinity, began his work so early in the 
morning, and how Wood, Professor of Ec- 
clesiastical History, sat up so late at night 
over his books, that, not infrequently, they 
met, and exchanged ideas, at the rising of 
the sun ; the one on his way to his study, 
the other on his way to his bed. 

The College of St. Mary's was based upon 
that of Paris, from which come its customs 
of the election of the Rector, the division of 
the students into what are called "nations," 
the institution of Faculties, and the granting 
of degrees. 

The University Library, just east of St. 
Mary's, on the south side of the South 



St. Andrews 175 

Street, and nearly opposite the Town 
Church, is now common to both institu- 
tions. Until the end of the eighteenth 
century, each college had its own collection 
of books, and its own room in which to hold 
them ; neither room nor collection being 
large or extensive. 

Shortly after the birth of James Sixth, 
Queen Mary executed a series of letters 
testamentary in which she disposed of her 
treasures, leaving certain volumes, in Greek 
and in Latin, to the University of St. An- 
drews. Like most of her subsequent plans, 
however, this one went very much "aglee. " 
And it was left to her son, after he ascended 
the English throne, to form a nucleus of the 
library. Many of his donations, generally 
theological in character, are said to be still 
preserved. The original building faces the 
South Street; a new building of later date, 
forming an **L," lies behind it. In the hall 
of the latter, all the University ceremonies 
of graduation, and the like, now take place. 

At the back of St. Mary's, entirely con- 



176 Scottish Universities 

cealed from the adjacent thoroughfares, afid 
not seen of men, except of the favoured few, 
are grand old gardens, which are believed 
to be the earliest cultivated grounds in all 
\ Scotland; for in St. Andrews, according to 
tradition, first began the development of 
Scottish soil, as well as of Scottish intellect. 

At the end of the seventeenth century, 
and at the beginning of the eighteenth, ac- 
cording to Mr. Andrew Lang, the feeling of 
Town against Gown was very strong. The 
inhabitants had a great aversion to learning, 
and to learned men. No burgess, or citizen, 
had ever been a scholar, not one had ever 
given a penny for the support of the Uni- 
versity, and some of the riots were ** fear- 
ful" — the word being Mr. Lang's own. The 
Town once brought cannon to the College 
gates to blow them down ; and one Towns- 
man drew a whinger, or large sword, on Dr. 
Skene within the precincts themselves. On 
the other hand. Gown conceived a spirited 
scheme of burning down the city. 

St. Andrews at that period could not have 



St. Andrews 177 

been altogether an attractive spot. There 
were no shops for the purchase of necessary 
commodities. Food was very expensive. 
The drinking-water was polluted by dirty 
clothes, dead fish, and other microbic hor- 
rors; the air was thin and piercing; pesti- 
lence was common ; and the acquirement of 
learning was, naturally, a very serious busi- 
ness. But times have changed for the bet- 
ter in St. Andrews, as the centuries have 
rolled on. 

I St. Andrews has, of course, its Students* 
Union like the other universities ; its stud- 
ents' clubs and societies; and its provision 
for the education of women, who wear caps 
and scarlet gowns exactly like those of 
the men ; a certain professor declaring that 
sometimes it is difficult to tell the lads from 
the lassies, except by their boots ! 

One of the earliest of the sons of St. An- 
drews was William Dunbar, whose name is 
said to have been entered on the register of 
St. Salvator's College in 1475, when he is 
supposed to have been in his fifteenth, or 



178 Scottish Universities 

sixteenth, year. He received the degree of 
B. A. in 1477, according to the same register, 
and that of M.A. in 1479. 

Scott called him "the darling of the Scot- 
tish Muses"; but the Scottish Muses paid 
very little attention to their darling for at 
least a couple of centuries. He seems to 
have been possessed of a certain amount of 
contemporary reputation, nevertheless, for 
his Golden Targe and his Two Harriet 
Wenien and the Wedo were printed in 1508, 
among the very earliest productions of the 
press of his native country. A "targe " 
would appear to have been what we call a 
"target," and a "wedo" in early Scotch 
was, no doubt, a woman who had been 
"marriet " and had had the misfortune to 
lose her husband by death. But until Allan 
Ramsay revived some of his poems, in 1724, 
Dunbar was entirely neglected and forgotten. 

Very little concerning the youth of Gavin 
Douglas, one of the most eminent of the 
early Scottish poets, has been handed down 
to us. It is not even known, positively, 



St. Andrews 179 

where his education was commenced or 
finished, although it is conceded that he 
studied in Paris; and certain later authorities 
claim to have discovered that he was a 
scholar at St. Andrews from 1489 to 1491. 
If this be true, St. Andrews has every reason 
to be proud of him. He is said to have felt 
the pangs of love, to have overcome them 
bravely, which was right and proper in a 
man who was later to become a Bishop of 
the Church of Rome, and to have written a 
translation of Ovid's Remedy of Love before 
he was twenty-five. All this, of course, was 
after his college days. In 15 13, he put into 
Scottish verse the ^neidy which is believed 
to be the earliest translation of any ancient 
classic into any British tongue. No doubt 
it would be a greater difficulty now to the 
modern student of the generally accepted 
British tongue than would be the original 
transcript of Virgil himself. 

Gavin's Palace of Honour, if it ever fell 
into the hands of John Bunyan, in Bedford 
Jail, or elsewhere, which is not improbable. 



i8o Scottish Universities 

may have suggested the more familiar, but 
still more than half-forgotten Pilgrims Pro- 
gress. There is a marked resemblance in the 
structure of the two works. Each of them 
is the narrative of a dream ; in each, the hero, 
conducted by spiritual beings, is journeying, 
through many difficulties, towards a better 
land. In each, the journey ends in a place 
of celestial happiness; and in each, there is 
a spot of eternal and over-heated discomfort, 
luckily avoided on the road. All this, how- 
ever, is given here as mere hearsay, by one 
who is willing to confess that he has never 
read The Palace of Honour, and who is 
ashamed to own that he has not read TJie 
Pilgrim s Progress since the days of his own 
youth; but who is ready to render to St. 
Andrews the credit of having at least in- 
spired the immortal allegory of Bunyan. 

Whether James Crichton, familiarly known 
for nearly three centuries and a half as "The 
Admirable Crichton," was as phenomenally 
admirable in a physical and in an intellectual 
way as tradition has painted him, it is not 



St. Andrews i8i 

an easy matter, at the end of all these years, 
to determine. A good deal of the quality 
of fable and of exaggeration seems to have 
been mixed with the pigments put, with a 
very heavy brush, upon the canvases of the 
unconscious romancers who have portrayed 
him. And one celebrated painter in a famous 
historical picture represents the wonderfully 
precocious youth as listening to a sermon 
preached by John Knox a year before the 
youth is supposed to have been brought into 
the world. Which, if it be true, would 
go to prove that the ** Admirable" young 
Scotsman must have been precocious in- 
deed. 

He was born in Perthshire, in 1560, or 
thereabouts, and at an early age he went to 
St. Salvator's College in St. Andrews. The 
progress he made in his studies is said to 
have been astonishing. He took his degree 
of B.A. when he was twelve; his degree 
of M.A. two years later; and for general 
proficiency, he ranked third in his class. 
Before he was twenty, according to his 



1 82 Scottish Universities 

biographers, he was a master of the sciences ; 
and he was able to speak, correctly and 
fluently, ten different languages. He pos- 
sessed, also, all the accomplishments befit- 
ting a gentleman of his time. He was an 
adept in drawing, in painting, in riding, in 
fencing, in singing, and in playing upon 
musical instruments of all the then known 
descriptions. He possessed, in addition, a 
face and form of unusual beauty and sym- 
metry ; and he was unequalled in every per- 
formance requiring activity, agility, and 
strength. We are gravely told by a writer 
otherwise reliable in his statements and 
temperate in his language, that "he [Crich- 
ton] would spring (in fencing) at one bound 
the space of twenty or twenty-four feet in 
closing with his antagonist; and he com- 
bined to a perfect science in the use of the 
sword such strength and dexterity that none 
could rival him. ' ' It makes one almost dizzy 
to read of what he knew and of what he could 
do, before his nourishing mothers, at St. 
Salvator's had completed their polishing of 



St. Andrews 183 

him; and had sent him off on his travels. 
He finished his career at the end of a couple 
of years, according to tradition, in a street 
brawl in an Italian city, after he had killed 
the best swordsman of the land in a duel, 
and had confounded the Solons of the Uni- 
versity of Padua in his disputations upon 
their interpretations of Aristotle. It is not 
to be wondered at that St. Andrews is proud 
of him to this day. 

The Library of the British Museum is said 
to contain the only complete set of his 
printed works. 

Robert Aytoun, Court Poet to James 
Sixth of Scotland and First of England, 
was considered by Charles First of Great 
Britain to be worthy of a resting-place in 
Westminster Abbey. He entered St. Leon- 
ard's College, in St. Andrews, in 1584, re- 
ceiving his degree of M.A. in 1588, when 
he was eighteen years of age. Ben Jonson 
loved him, Dryden admired his verse, and 
Burns paraphrased his Inconstancy Reproved 
in the dialect of his (Burns's) own time; the 



1 84 Scottish Universities 

last-named poet declaring that he thought 
he ' ' improved the simplicity of the sentiment 
by giving the words in a Scot's dress." 

The poem, in Burns's version, opens with 
the line: 

" I do confess thou art sae fair," 

and it is generally conceded, by the admirers 
of both poets, that the words were better 
clad by the original versifier, although cer- 
tain authorities doubt that Aytoun had any- 
thing at all to do with their composition. 
Burns himself, on the other hand, never 
seems to have believed that Aytoun was the 
author oi Aidd Lang Sync; although it has 
been asserted that he it was who first asked 
the tuneful and touching question : ** Should 
old acquaintance be forgot? " 

As is usual in the meagre biographies of 
the men of his time, very little is set down 
concerning what Aytoun did at College. 

Zachary Boyd, author of Flowers of Zion 
and The Last Battell of the Soule, was at St. 
Andrews from 1603 to 1607, when he took 



St. Andrews 185 

his degree of M. A. But he is more in- 
timately associated with Glasgow University 
under the head of which he is treated at 
some length. 

Adam Ferguson, the friend of Home and 
Hume, of Hugh Blair and of Adam Smith, 
entered the University of St. Andrews in 
1739, when he was fifteen years of age. He 
stood at the head of his class, during his first 
term, winning one of four bursaries in the 
Latin examinations and thereby obtaining 
free board at the College table during the 
rest of his career there. As Greek was 
rarely taught in the elementary schools of 
that period, Ferguson before his going to 
St. Andrews seems to have been entirely 
ignorant of the dead language in question. 
But he devoted himself assiduously to its 
study; and it is said that he was able to 
construe his Homer in the course of a few 
months, even setting to himself the task of 
preparing a hundred lines of the Iliad every 
day, during his vacations. The rest of his 
attendance at College was devoted to the 



1 86 Scottish Universities 

attainment of a knowledge of logic, mathe- 
matics, ethics, and metaphysics. 

Robert Fergusson, whom Robert Burns 
once called **his elder brother in misfortune, 
by far his elder brother in the muses," was 
the son of a tradesman in Aberdeen ; and 
he was originally intended for the Church. 
He was fortunate enough, when he was 
thirteen, to obtain a bursary at St. Andrews, 
endowed by a certain Mr. Fergusson, for 
the benefit of young men bearing his own 
name. Robert's classic attainments were 
respectable, we are told ; but he always ex- 
pressed a decided contempt for the austere 
branches of scholastic and scientific know- 
ledge. He was distinguished among his 
fellow students, for vivacity and humour; 
and he soon began to exhibit a certain 
amount of poetic talent upon local and oc- 
casional subjects; his verse being marked by 
a playful sarcasm which made him popular 
with his classmates, and not unknown to 
his instructors. 

One of his early undergraduate poems, 



St. Andrews 187 

still preserved, is an elegy upon a professor 
of mathematics then lately deceased, of 
whom he said, among other things, that 

" By numbers, too, he could divine 
That three times three just made up nine 
But now he 's dead! " 

One of Fergusson's playful undergraduate 
habits was to put his occasional paternal re- 
mittance into a small bag, and to hang it by 
a string, out of his window but out of the 
reach of passers-by, for a day or two. This 
was to exhibit his pure exultation at having 
money to spend, a seemingly rare experience 
with him. 

His pranks at college were many, and 
sometimes original. Once during an after- 
noon's walk, he stopped, for refreshment, at 
a cottage where lay sick of a fever a member 
of the family. Fergusson pretended to be 
a doctor, went through all the formalities of 
feeling the pulse, examining the temperature 
critically, and prescribing a mild remedy ; 
doing no harm to the patient thereby, and, 



1 88 Scottish Universities 

perhaps, by the pseudo physician's cheerful- 
ness, doing the patient some good. On an- 
other occasion he arose, gravely, in church, 
and asked the congregation to remember in 
prayer, by name, one of his classmates, then 
present, as *'a young man of whom, from 
the sudden effect of inebriety, there appeared 
to be but small hope of recovery." 

In 1767, Fergusson was expelled from 
college for engaging in a free-fight about 
some academical regulation; but he was 
taken back upon promise of better be- 
haviour. He left college at the end of four 
years, when the term of his bursary expired. 
He is hardly a fair example of the average 
St. Andrews man ; and his conduct is not to 
be emulated or endorsed. 

In one of his early poems, written during 
his student days, Fergusson sang the praises 
of haggis, skait, sheep's-head, and sowens 
as the proper ingredients for a real good 
dinner. He was fond of singing of the 
charms of beer-drinking in the janitor's 
lodge ; and about all he did, in St. Andrews, 



St. Andrews 189 

was to make verses, to drink ale and whisky, 
and to amuse himself generally, in a way 
equally discreditable. 

His own habits of inebriety were not sud- 
den, but chronic. He drank himself into an 
insane asylum in Edinburgh ; and there he 
died, just as he had reached the age of 
twenty-four. 

Burns confessed that The Cotter s Satur- 
day Night was inspired by The Farmer s 
Ingle of Fergusson. He recovered and re- 
stored Fergusson's neglected, and almost 
forgotten, grave in the Canongate church- 
yard, in Edinburgh, and he caused a suit- 
able monument to be erected at its head. 

One of the most distinguished of St. An- 
drews men, and a man most emphatically a 
St. Andrews man, was Dr. Andrew Bell. 
He was born in the grand old scholariy 
town on the east coast of Fife. He was 
educated in her University, and he founded 
her Madras College, which is a noble monu- 
ment to any person. 

His father was a barber-surgeon, living 



190 Scottish Universities 

and practising his dual art in the South 
Street, on the east side of, and adjoining, 
the Parish Church. 

Bell's name is found in the matriculation 
list of the United College, under the date 
of 1769. He is known to have been the 
youngest student in the mathematical class, 
and he obtained the first prize in mathe- 
matics when he was sufficiently juvenile 
to be called, affectionately, and familiarly, 
"Little Andrew." Even in those days he 
eked out his scanty resources by private 
teaching, having among his pupils a number 
of his fellows who were several years his 
senior in age. He used to say of himself, 
that he never refused to teach anything ; for 
he was always able, by nightly study, to 
"cram" himself sufficiently for the next 
day's lessons; storing his own mind with 
valuable information as he went along. 

Andrew Bell was crammed and loaded 
with the stuff of which students and scholars 
are usually made. And there is no record 
of his ever having turned his attention par- 




THOMAS CHALMERS. 



St. Andrews 191 

ticularly to football or to athletics generally, 
which do not always make scholars and 
students. 

Thomas Chalmers began his college course 
at St. Andrews at the mature age of eleven. 
The Rev. Mr. Miller, who was his classmate, 
and intimate, there, says that he was, during 
the first year or two, volatile, boyish (natur- 
ally), and idle in his habits, devoting himself 
to football, and particularly to hand-ball, at 
which he was very dexterous. It was not 
until the third session, 1793-94, that he be- 
gan to show signs of intellectual develop- 
ment or anything like a disposition towards 
serious study. In the autumn of 1795, 
when he was fifteen, he was enrolled as a 
student of divinity; in 1802, he became 
assistant Professor of Mathematics, and in 
1823, Professor of Moral Philosophy. In 
one of his earlier lectures, during this latter 
course, he is reported as objecting to certain 
indecorum and obstreperousness of conduct 
upon the part of his students, and especially 
to the introduction of a certain noisy stranger 



192 Scottish Universities 

who "added his testimony to the general 
voice, and whose presence within those walls 
was monstrously out of keeping with the 
character and business of a place of litera- 
ture. The bringing in of that dog," Dr. 
Chalmers concluded, **was a great breach of 
all academic propriety." It is not recorded 
whose dog it was, or upon what subject the 
dog raised his voice. But no dog, who 
amounted to anything, ever barked at 
Thomas Chalmers. 

Sir David Brewster, a graduate of Edin- 
burgh University, became Principal of the 
United College at St. Andrews in 1838, and 
retained the position for nearly a quarter of 
a century, living as has been shown, in the 
precincts of Old St. Leonard's. He took 
an active part in what was called "The Dis- 
ruption" Movement; and he was one of the 
founders of the Free Kirk. This, naturally, 
was an exceedingly unpopular step in the 
eyes of the University authorities, and an 
attempt was made, by the Established 
Church Presbytery of St. Andrews, to eject 



St. Andrews 193 

him from his chair. Public opinion, accord- 
ing to his daughter, and biographer, was 
upon his side; and after months of attack 
and defence, the case, in 1845, ^^s finally 
"quashed," to use his own words. In i860, 
he resigned the position to accept the Prin- 
cipalship of Edinburgh, his Alma Mater. 



Index 

Aberdeen University, foundation of, by union 
of King's and Marischal Colleges, 126; local cus- 
toms, 131; woman graduate of, 133 

Alexander VI, Pope, founding of King's College, 
Aberdeen, by, 117 

Aytoun, Robert, Court poet, student at St. An- 
drews, 183 

Aytoun, William Edmonstoune, author of Lays of 
the Cavaliers, student and professor at Edinburgh, 
69 

Beattie, James, author of The Minstrel, student at 
Marischal College, Aberdeen, 144 

"bejan," derivation of term, 4 

Bell, Dr. Andrew, founder of Madras College, St. 
Andrews, 157; student at St. Andrews, 189 

Blackie, John Stuart, student and professor at 
Edinburgh, 66; student at Marischal College, 
Aberdeen, 147 

Blair, Hugh, scholar and divine, student at Edin- 
burgh, 42 

Boece, Hector, first historian of King's College, 
Aberdeen, 121; first principal, 140 

Boswell, James, student at Edinburgh, 52; student 
at Glasgow, 103 

Boyd, Zachary, student at St. Andrews, 184; vice- 
chancellor of University of Glasgow, 96 
195 



196 Index 

Brewster, Sir David, student at Edinburgh, 61; 
principal of United College, St. Andrews, 192; 
occupant of part of St. Leonard's College build- 
ings, St. Andrews, 167 

Brougham, Lord Henry, student at Edinburgh, 59 

Brown, John, author of Rab and his Friends, 
student at Edinburgh, 69 

Bulloch, John Malcolm, author of History of Aber- 
deen, 122 

Burns, Robert, meeting of, with Scott, 47 ; compared 
with Scott, 53 ; indebtedness of, to Robert Fergus- 
son, 189 

Burton, John Hill, student and bursar at Marischal 
College, Aberdeen, 148 

Byron, Lord, attended school at Aberdeen, 136 

Cadyow, David, earliest rector of Glasgow Univer- 
sity, 94 
Campbell, Thomas, student at Glasgow, 106 
Carlyle, Alexander, student at Glasgow, 85 
Carlyle, Thomas, student at Edinburgh, 62; rector 

of Edinburgh University, 65 
celibacy enforced at Aberdeen, 127 
Chalmers, Thomas, student at St. Andrews, 191; 

professor of divinity at Edinburgh, 70 
Colman, George, playwright, student at King's 

College, Aberdeen, 147 
Coutts, James, author of Short Account of the 

University of Glasgow, 86 
Crichton, James, "the Admirable," student at St. 

Andrews, 180 
Cruden, Alexander, author of Concordance of the 

Bible, student at Marischal College, Aberdeen, 

142 



Index 197 

Darnley, Lord, house of, in Edinburgh, 5 
Darwin, Charles, student at Edinburgh, 67 
Douglas, Gavin, poet, student at St. Andrews, 178 
Drummond, William, friend of Ben Jonson, 

student at Edinburgh, 10, 37 
Dunbar, William, poet, student at St. Andrews, 177 
Duncan, Prof., of United College, St. Andrews, 

anecdote of, 166 
Dundee, Annex to St. Andrews at, 157 

Edinburgh University, foundation of, 3; medical 
schools of, 7; library of, 10; societies in, 20 

Elphinstone, Bishop, patron of King's College, 
Aberdeen, 118 

Ferguson, Adam, student at St. Andrews, 185; pro- 
fessor at Edinburgh, 46; meeting of Scott and 
Bums at the house of, 47 

Fergusson, Rev. Menzies, author of My College 
Days, Edinburgh, 26 

Fergusson, Robert, poet, student at St. Andrews, 
186 

Fleming, Hay, quotation by, from old inventory of 
St. Leonard's College, St. Andrews, 168 

Froude's Life of Thomas Carlyle, descriptions of 
Scottish viniversity life in, 28 

Glasgow, University of, foundation of, 79; educa- 
tion of women at, 96; jubilee of, 77 
Goldsmith, Oliver, studied medicine at Edinburgh, 

Guthrie, Thomas, student at Edinburgh, 66 

Hamilton, family of, connected with St. Mary's 
College, St. Andrews, 173 



198 Index 



Home, John, dramatic poet, student at Edinburgh, 

44 
Hume, David, student at Edinburgh, 41 

James VI of Scotland, charter granted by, for 

foimding of Edinburgh University, 3 
Jeffrey, Francis, student at Glasgow, 104 
Johnson, Dr., his opinion of Beattie, 145; his 
opinion of Macpherson, 146 

Kennedy, Kate, traditional character of St. An- 
drews, 160 
King's College, Aberdeen, founding of, 117 
Knox, John, sermon preached by, in Black Friars* 
Chapel, St. Andrews, 158 

Litil, Clement, founder of Edinburgh library, 10 
Lockhart, John Gibson, son-in-law of Scott, student 

at Glasgow, 108; quotation from life of, by 

Andrew Lang, 89 

Macdonald, George, student at Aberdeen, 135 
Mackenzie, Henry, "the Man of Feeling," student 

at Edinburgh, 50 
Macleod, Norman, student at Edinburgh, 71; 

student at Glasgow, 112 
Macpherson, James, translator of "Ossian," student 

at Marischal College, Aberdeen, 145 
Madras College, preparatory school to University 

of St. Andrews, 157 
Mallet, David, friend and classmate of James 

Thomson, student at Edinburgh, 40 
Marischal College, Aberdeen, founding of, 123 
Marischal, George, fifth earl, founder of Marischal 

College, Aberdeen, 123 



Index 199 



Mitchell, Dr. Charles, patron of Marischal College, 
Aberdeen, 125 

Nicholas V, Pope, founder of Glasgow University, 
79 

Park, Mungo, student at Edinburgh, 59 

Playfair, Sir Hugh Lyon, occupant of part of St. 

Leonard's College buildings, St. Andrews, 168 
Pollok, Robert, student at Glasgow, no 

Robertson, William, historian, student at Edin- 
burgh, 45 

Ross, Alexander, student at Marischal College, 
Aberdeen, 141 

Rutherford, Prof., of St. Mary's College, St. Andrews, 
anecdote of, 174 

St. Andrews University, founding of, 152; riots 
between "town and gown," 176; education of 
women at, 177 

St. Leonard's College, St. Andrews, founded, 153; 
absorption with St. Salvator's, 164; originally 
a hospital for pilgrims, 166; a nunnery, 166; 
old inventory of, 1 68 ; until Reformation a mon- 
astic institution, 171; chapel of, 172 ; name 
perpetuated in school for girls, 172 

St. Mary's College, St. Andrews, founded, 153; 
average number of students at, 155; at first 
restricted to teaching of divinity, 173 

St. Salvator's College, St. Andrews, founded, 153; 
chapel of, 159; charter of, 163; absorption with 
St. Leonard's, 164 

Scott, Sir Gilbert, architect of new building of 
Glasgow University, 95 



200 Index 



Scott, Michael, student at Glasgow, 112 

Scott, Sir Walter, student at Edinburgh, 54; 

meeting of, with Burns, 47 ; compared with 

Burns, 53 
Shakspere, possible visit of, to Aberdeen, 138 
Sharp, Rev. James, description of student life of, 

at Edinburgh, 31 
Smail, Thomas, college friend of Carlyle, 63 
Smith, Adam, student at Glasgow, loi; lectured at 

Edinburgh, 50 
Smollett, Tobias, student at Glasgow, 99; quotation 

from Humphry Clinker by, 46 
Stevenson, Robert Louis, student at Edinburgh, 71 
Stewart, Dugald, student at Glasgow, 103; professor 

at Edinburgh, 49 

Taylor, Tom, student at Glasgow, 113 
Thomson, James, author of The Seasons, student 
at Edinburgh, 38 

United College, St. Andrews, formed by the union 

of St. Salvator's and St. Leonard's, 153 
Universities Act of 1889, 96 

Watt, James, mathematical instrument maker to 

the University of Glasgow, 103 
Wilson, John, "Christopher North," student at 

Glasgow, 108; professor at Edinburgh, 57 
Witherspoon, John, president of Princeton College, 

and signer of the Declaration of Independence, 

student at Edinburgh, 49 
Wood, Prof., of St. Mary's College, St. Andrews, 

anecdote of, 174 
Woodrow, Robert, author of History of the Sufferings 

of the Church of Scotland, student at Glasgow, 99 



JUi 17 1904: 



LIBRARY OF CONGRE^c; 

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